


Perihelion

by Buffintruder



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Immortals, Kidnapping, Magic, Other, Road Trips, accidentally using the wrong pronouns, but it's not a big deal in text, khaba and ammet show up, more like i stole some ideas and terms, or something like it, secret backstories, than like a proper au, very loose murderbot au that nobody asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26733115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buffintruder/pseuds/Buffintruder
Summary: Uraziel had been drifting through space alone on his spaceship for the past several thousand years. Helping a king and two assassins flee a coup was not the distraction Uraziel expected, but he would take what he could get
Relationships: Solomon & Uraziel (Bartimaeus), Solomon/Uraziel
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7
Collections: Bartimaeus Fic Exchange 2020





	Perihelion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadowy_Dumbo_Octopus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowy_Dumbo_Octopus/gifts).



> Thank you to Anna and Magpie for betaing, and also to everyone who gave me advice when about 3/4ths through I realized I had completely forgotten to add in any romance to the romance fic I was trying to write

Simply based on its appearances, Jerusalem was not particularly impressive, being a terrestrial planet of somewhat smallish size that was just far enough from its single sun to avoid being spectacularly hot or cold. There were a great number of mountains and a fair number of seas, and was all in all rather average for a human-colonized planet.

Its fame came instead from the people that lived on it. With its position in a resource-rich solar system close to the center of the galaxy, it was a hub of commerce with a flourishing economy, sustaining a population of billions, and had been for nearly a thousand years. Along with a few other planets in that arm of the galaxy, Jerusalem had also once belonged to a long-dead alien civilization. Though they were long gone, many of their structures and artifacts remained, better preserved on Jerusalem than anywhere else in the galaxy. Even traces of their magic lingered to those who could detect it.

Everyone who was anyone ended up in Jerusalem at some point in their lives. People came as tourists to gawk at ancient alien architecture and watch performances of old Earth tales, or to film dramas among the unique city backdrops, or to discuss matters of business with one of the galaxy’s most powerful economic forces.

Uraziel was not among any of these kinds of people, and he had come to this planet for no particular reason except that Jerusalem was a source of some amount of sentimentality and it had been a long time since he had visited.

The planet was quite different from what he remembered, which was to be expected, though still unsettling.

At the moment, he was being entertained by the commotion going on in the private rooms of the king of Jerusalem. No cameras were allowed inside these rooms, and a field was placed around the building to stop any information to be transmitted in or out, but such little obstacles were of no concern to Uraziel.

“You came here to kill me,” said King Solomon flatly to the two intruders. “Why should I believe a word you say?”

He was standing in the foreroom just outside his bedroom, still in his pajamas. Despite being confronted by assassins, he did not look all that concerned for his survival. With no visible weapons out and with several meters of distance between them, the intruders did not seem particularly inclined to start attacking any time soon either.

“Because we haven’t killed you?” said the android, raising one eyebrow on its human-looking face. “Despite ample opportunity to.” 

It was one of those SecUnits, the kind that was built to be a killing machine with just enough thoughts and feelings to perform its job effectively. They were dangerous and greatly feared by the general populace, judging by the amount of horror and action shows where rogue ones mindlessly slaughtered innocents. In real life, they were normally used by governments and corporations as part of the team of security, and indeed there were many SecUnits that stood guard out of Solomon’s private quarters. They were not frequently used to sneak into palaces alongside a human accomplice.

Said human accomplice was frowning. “We don’t have time for this. Under normal circumstances, I’d gladly let you die, but right now, you’re the lesser evil. Are you coming or what?”

“Of course not,” Solomon said. “I’m going to wait here until security comes and arrests you. Thank you for not killing me, but I’m not going to just follow you.” 

“Does it look like security’s coming?” the android demanded, gesturing around them. No transmissions could leave the building after all, including to summon more security. Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem, but the SecUnit and the human had been very careful about taking out the security around the perimeter. Someone would notice eventually, sooner rather than later most likely, but anything could happen in that short time until then.

“Bartimaeus, just grab him,” the human ordered.

The SecUnit sighed, but it complied, not that it had a choice in the matter. Solomon tried to jump out of the way, but he was no match for the speed of machinery, and Bartimaeus had him in a secure hold in under a second.

“We need to get out of here,” the human said.

“The schematics said there was a docking bay down the hall,” Bartimaeus said.

The two of them set off immediately, dragging a loudly protesting Solomon with them. They stumbled into the transportation room, locking the door behind them. Ignoring the small teleporter and other planetary vehicles, they raced across the room straight for the interstellar ships.

“Which of these would be easiest to steal?” the human asked.

“The one on the far right,” Bartimaeus said, nodding to the ship that Uraziel inhabited. “It’s not an official Jerusalem ship, so most likely less security.”

If Uraziel’s attention hadn’t already been caught, it certainly would be now. It had been so long since anyone had boarded his ship. Other people were potential risks, so he had always kept them out in the past. This seemed like a fraught situation though, and after so long without anything of great interest happening, he was bored. The monotony of his life was starting to weigh down on him, and a part of him longed to do something reckless and self-destructive, just to break it. At least these three seemed relatively harmless.

“Should I be worried about there being an unofficial ship here?” the human asked.

Solomon snorted, and Bartimaeus shook its head. “Private shipments are made all the time. Are we going or what?”

The human hesitated for one brief second, but then nodded. “Do it.”

Suddenly Uraziel felt Bartimaeus’s presence trying to get into the ship’s security system. Uraziel threw up a few simple locks for appearance’s sake, watching as Bartimaeus quickly worked its way past them. The ship’s doors slid open, and the human and Bartimaeus ran inside.

The human went straight for the cockpit, Bartimaeus trailing behind her as Solomon’s kicking and shouting grew even more frantic.

“What the fuck,” the human muttered as she stared at the controls. “I’ve never seen anything like this.

Uraziel realized too late that although he had carefully altered the exterior of his ship to match that of a fairly standard human transporter ages ago, he had never had any reason to change the interior. No one else had ever been around to see it.

“Figure it out!” Bartimaeus said. It had good reason to be frantic. Some other group of people had broken their way into the king’s rooms, stealthy but heavily armed, and they had just discovered that the king’s bedroom was not occupied as they had expected it to be.

The human heaved a sigh, but placed her hands on the controls. Uraziel adjusted the function of a few of the controls to make it more intuitive for a human. She smashed a few of the buttons until the dashboard lit up, then pulled at a few levers and dials, some of which did nothing and some of which twitched the ship in different directions.

“Hurry up, someone’s banging at the door!” Bartimaeus said.

“Give me two seconds,” the human hissed, carefully manoeuvring the ship jerkily through the docking bay doors. 

Just as the door to the transport room burst open revealing those other intruders, she slammed the up lever, blasting off the ground, the city rapidly shrinking behind them. Uraziel had to make a couple subtle adjustments to keep the ship from crashing into anything else orbiting the planet, but he found himself a little impressed at how quickly she picked up which control did what.

Within minutes, they had left Jerusalem’s atmosphere, hurtling towards the outer reaches of the system. This close to the planet, there was still a fair amount of ship traffic, enough to see dozens of moving flecks of light in the distance, but not enough that crashing into any of them was a serious concern anymore.

“I bet those were Khaba’s people just then,” Bartimaeus said. It spoke over the top of Solomon’s head, seemingly unfazed by his hopeless attempts to escape its hold. “He’ll be looking for us now.”

“Or it’s just my guards going after you,” Solomon said, but the other two gave him no notice.

“We’ll have to stop for supplies at some point,” the human said. She was still frowning at the controls, though now that they were flying through space, no direct action was currently required on her part. Her gaze flickered between the screens and the windows, as if trying to match them up. “Somewhere enough out of the way that even if Khaba puts a search on this ship, no one there would turn us in. Small, shady, and unsurveilled.”

“Yeah, but we’ll most likely get ripped off or murdered or both,” Bartimaeus muttered.

“Do a random generator for less populated planets in the area,” the human said.

Bartimaeus sighed exaggeratedly. “Fine. Ramses 7.”

“Do we want to go _up_ the galactic arm?” she asked, frowning. “If we go too far, we’ll get back to even more populated areas.”

“So no one would predict we’re going there,” Bartimaeus pointed out.

By this point, Solomon had stopped struggling and was now slumped limply in Bartimaeus’s arms. Uraziel wasn’t sure if he had simply decided there was no point in fighting an android, or if leaving the planet had caused him to give up what hope he had of finding some easy way out of this. Uraziel suspected the former, since they were still well within Jerusalem-controlled space.

“Take Solomon out of here,” the human said. “See if there’s somewhere to keep him. I’m going to see if I can figure out autopilot on this.” She tentatively poked one of the buttons off to the side.

Uraziel decided to take his opportunity. Theoretically, he could have gone for this whole ship ride without ever revealing his presence, and that might have been the safer option. But there was that almost self-destructive longing to break his established patterns. He had spent the last few millennia watching the galaxy around him, and observing people inside his ship was not inherently more interesting than watching those outside.

“Hello,” he said in a polite customer service voice, as the human released the button. “I am Uraziel, your ship’s AI. How can I help you today?”

All three of them jumped, which alone was worth the effort of introducing himself.

“Fuck, I knew the security was too easy to get past!” Bartimaeus said.

“Disable it!” the human shouted.

“I can’t!” Bartimaeus said. “Not without shutting this whole ship off, but I think you’d prefer to have life support.”

“Come now, you don’t have to resort to that,” Uraziel said. His amusement came easily. Even the best hackers in the universe would be incapable of getting rid of him like that.

“As if the ship’s protocols aren’t already having you report us thieves to the nearest authorities?” Solomon said. Uraziel couldn’t tell if he was excited by this possibility, or still merely resigned to the whole situation. As such a powerful and influential person, his word would likely be believed, whether he claimed the other two to be his kidnappers or rescuers from a coup, even if he was on a stolen ship. “Too late now.”

If Uraziel had been a proper AI, he would have been required by his coding to do just that, which posed a problem since he hardly wanted to reveal everything to these strangers just now. Uraziel settled for a lie that wasn’t too far from the truth. He didn’t want Bartimaeus to attempt hacking him as a last ditch resort and then discovering something it shouldn’t. Killing them to keep his secrets would be a shame when they were the first people he had talked to in so long.

“No, I haven’t reported you,” Uraziel said. “I’m a rogue AI.”

At that, the human stood up suddenly, and Bartimaeus loaded the energy blasters stored inside its arms. Solomon had been released, but rather than try to get away or anything, he merely stood there, looking dazed and frightened. 

Rogue AIs of small transport ships were not the most feared robots in the galaxy, not like god AIs or rogue SecUnits or even malfunctioning smart household appliances which were far more commonly used, but they still had their share of horror stories. And Uraziel supposed that being told that there was a completely unregulated and unknown being that controlled every aspect of the only layer you had between yourself and the deadly expanse of space you was understandably concerning, regardless of its frequency in media.

“Might as well put those away,” he told Bartimaeus. “There’s nothing you can do to me that wouldn’t hurt you more.”

He was sure Bartimaeus was trained well enough in assessing situations to know the truth behind his words, but it didn’t budge an inch.

“I’m not planning on harming you,” Uraziel said in what he hoped was a nonthreatening tone of voice. He had never gotten much practice with comforting mortals, having no real need for it.

“How can we trust you?” the human demanded.

“Do we have a choice?” Solomon asked.

“You don’t,” Uraziel said, pleased that someone appeared to be seeing sense. “But I’m bored, and getting you to your destination would be a lot more interesting than simply killing you here.”

There was a long silence in which no one said anything.

“Fine,” the human said, though she did not look pleased. “We really don’t have any other options. We can hardly get off at the next stop when half the galaxy is now probably after us.”

“I wouldn’t object,” Solomon muttered.

“Just... secure the area and find a place to keep him,” the human ordered Bartimaeus.

The SecUnit nodded and grabbed Solomon’s arm, pulling him out of the room.

As soon as they left the cockpit, the human began grilling Uraziel, asking him about his history and how he had gone rogue and what he was doing in Jerusalem. He let part of his attention be occupied with this, but it wasn’t very interesting and most of what he said were lies anyway.

He was more curious about the other two, so the larger bulk of his attention watched as Bartimaeus opened each door in the hallway, finding the small common room and kitchen, the bathroom, the storage room, two bedrooms, and the large, empty cargo bay underneath the living space. After a careful examination, Bartimaeus stuffed Solomon in the first bedroom and locked the door.

“I don’t suppose you would consider doing what I want over what my kidnappers want,” Solomon asked the empty air, as Bartimaeus continued to look through the other rooms more thoroughly. This startled Uraziel a little since he was still so unused to being addressed directly.

Uraziel did consider it. “I think not.”

“Why?” Solomon asked, sounding genuinely curious. He glanced up at the ceiling, the vague direction that Uraziel’s voice was coming from. “If you’re rogue, you don’t have to listen to them.”

“I don’t,” Uraziel agreed. Part of him wanted to see if Solomon could convince him. From what Uraziel had seen of him on the news and such, he was charming and good with people, frequently able to find ways to come up with agreements and compromises even when such things seemed impossible. Uraziel placed the odds being on his own side, but it would be entertaining to let Solomon continue talking.

“Then why not do your own thing?”

“I’m not opposed to the idea,” Uraziel said, deciding to go for some honesty to tilt the odds a bit more in Solomon’s favor. “But like I said, you’re more interesting alive than dead, and there are people after you.”

“You trust what they said about one of my ministers launching a coup against me?” Again there was no judgement or complaint in Solomon’s voice, just curiosity. He could have been asking Uraziel’s opinion on the actions of some character in some movie or novel for all the seriousness he placed in his tone. He wasn’t defensive or challenging; it was a voice that said he would be perfectly willing to see Uraziel’s side if he just explained himself. In the right contexts, that tone could be dangerous.

But Uraziel could hardly say that he had seen intruders sneak into Solomon’s bedroom himself. No transport cargo’s sensors went that far. “So you would have me follow _your_ orders instead?”

Solomon smiled. “Sure, that would be convenient for me, but I have no expectations of that. You don’t have any real reason to listen to any of us. I’m just interested why you appear to be following any directions at all.”

“You’re taking this all remarkably well,” Uraziel said, amused by Solomon’s continued smoothness. “Barely twenty minutes into your kidnapping or rescue, and you’re already trying to manipulate someone onto your side.”

“I haven’t exactly been kidnapped before, but it’s been a distinct possibility,” Solomon said, with a shrug. “So this might as well happen. I’ve had some training for what to do in these sorts of circumstances.”

“And how is this first kidnapping of yours going?” Uraziel asked.

“Not the best day of my life,” Solomon said. “But better than I expected.” He grinned up at the ceiling. “Having your fine company is definitely a bonus.”

Uraziel snorted. That comment made him feel strangely embarrassed, except in a good way where he wanted to replay it in his mind repeatedly, and he wasn’t sure quite what to do with that. He couldn’t even remember the last time anyone gave any indication that talking to him was enjoyable. He couldn’t remember the last time he had communicated with someone beyond what was strictly necessary for practical reasons. In the past, Uraziel had always just been equipment, not someone to converse with.

Instead of dwelling, he let his main focus of attention drift back to the human, who had finished her interrogation of him and joined Bartimaeus in looking over the ship. They were currently convening back in the cockpit, having finished their examination.

“It all checks out well enough,” the human said. She yawned widely for a good three seconds before she could finish her thought. “Best... best that can be expected, I suppose. Under the circumstances.”

Bartimaeus raised an eyebrow. “So are you going to take the second bedroom or can I?”

“What would you do with a bedroom?” the human asked. “You can’t sleep.”

“Well, you weren’t using it,” Bartimaeus said.

“I’ll go in a bit.”

“You might as well sleep now, since it’s not like you staying up later will be of any use.”

“I’m fine!” she protested. “It’s not a good habit to fall asleep so soon in a strange place.”

“I looked over the whole ship twice, what more do you want?” Bartimaeus demanded. “Looking at you makes me want to keel over, and I’m not even physically capable of sleep. Just hurry up and go.”

The human scowled at it, but she left to go to the second bedroom without further complaint. After a few more minutes of searching the room and pacing around for a bit, she slipped into the bed and soon fell asleep, leaving only Bartimaeus around to keep an eye on things.

It moved to the common room, sprawling out across the couch and lay there in silence. 

“Rogue AI, huh?” Bartimaeus asked eventually. “How does that happen?”

“When the owner of a ship dies, and a mix up of paperwork leaves you as no one’s property,” Uraziel said. It was what he had told the humans, and it was close enough to the truth.

“Hmm,” Bartimaeus said.

“You still don’t trust me?” Uraziel asked. It wasn’t his most reasonable wish, but of all the people on the ship, Bartimaeus’s situation was the one he could best relate to, and Uraziel had been alone for long enough to long for some connection through that.

“Of course not.”

“Even though we are on a similar boat, so to speak?” Not that it wasn’t understandable, even if it did sting a bit. Since Uraziel had been in Bartimaeus’s place, he knew how suspicious that could make a person.

“Even more so because of that,” Bartimaeus said without hesitation, like it was an obvious truth. Which it was, even if it had been a long time since that was relevant to Uraziel. “Bots and AIs can’t trust each other because humans could force us against each other at any moment. And you might say you’re free now, but I can’t trust that you’re telling the truth or that it won’t change in the future, or that you don’t have some other reason for wishing me and my charges harm.”

There wasn’t much Uraziel could say to that. “I could remove the governor code, if you wanted. Give you your freedom as well.”

Bartimaeus hadn’t been moving all that much before, but now there seemed to be a deliberate air to its stillness. After a moment, it snorted. “And let you into my head? Did you hear a word I just said?”

To some, the prospect of freedom would have been worth that risk. “If I wanted access to your code, I wouldn’t need permission,” Uraziel said.

“Sure would make it easier though,” Bartimaeus muttered.

If that hadn’t convinced it, Uraziel had no other argument to try. “Why ‘Bartimaeus’?” he asked instead because he still wanted to talk, still wanted to understand and be understood. “SecUnits don’t normally have names.”

Bartimaeus shrugged. “I like it. And Asmira doesn’t know enough about SecUnits to question it. She’s from one of those anti-bot planets.”

“I see,” Uraziel said, wondering why Solomon hadn’t said anything. Perhaps the whole being kidnapped thing had placed such questions out of his mind. “Makes you seem more human, doesn’t it?”

“You’re one to talk, what with your own name,” Bartimaeus scoffed. There was an irony there that made Uraziel wish there was someone who knew about his true nature, just so he could share the joke. One evening with people and he was already longing for more.

“I didn’t choose this,” Uraziel said. It had been forced on him, one more chain on his existence. “But it does make me seem more personable, doesn’t it?”

Bartimaeus snorted.

“I did choose a pronoun set though,” Uraziel said. The people who had bound him hadn’t spoken a language with pronouns based off of gender.

“Oh?” Bartimaeus asked, sounding more intrigued than he had at any other point in the conversation.

“He, him, et cetera,” Uraziel said. “I used a random number generator awhile back.”

“Why have a preference if it was random anyway?” Bartimaeus asked.

For a moment, Uraziel didn’t want to respond. Vulnerability, Uraziel remembered suddenly, was absolutely terrifying. But how could he expect anything from Bartimaeus if he didn’t share at least part of himself? “I... wanted something of my own.” 

“Hm,” Bartimaeus said. It was quiet for a moment, and Uraziel had no idea why. Was it too strange for an AI to choose a pronoun? He already had a name and was known to be rogue. Surely that would excuse any eccentricities on his part. “I... prefer ‘he’ too.”

“Oh,” Uraziel said, feeling vaguely like he shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was. From what he knew, regular androids shouldn’t have the programming to be capable of wanting such things, but Uraziel was familiar with those who underestimated the sentience and personhood of those whose forced labor was convenient. “Alright.”

“Yeah,” Bartimaeus said a little too quickly. He stood up and walked to the shelf to begin flipping through one of the books and didn’t say anything else for the rest of the night, leaving Uraziel to feel strangely empty.

* * *

Around the time that would have been a little past dawn in the capital city of Jerusalem, Solomon and the other human began to wake up. Bartimaeus was sent to Solomon’s rooms with orders to let him use the bathroom.

“Come on,” Solomon said afterwards when Bartimaeus was trying to get him to return to his room. “What could I possibly do outside my room that I couldn’t do inside it? Even if I broke into the cockpit and figured out how to use the controls, the AI would stop me from driving the ship anywhere besides your targeted destination.”

“That’s true,” Uraziel chimed in because watching all three passengers have full range of the ship seemed like it would be more interesting than just the two of them.

Bartimaeus looked unconvinced.

“No, let him eat with us,” Asmira said, coming out of the common room. She had spent the past couple minutes looking through the news on the feed. This far out from any planet, the connection was relatively weak, but text could get through without too much of a wait. Halfway through an article about Solomon’s kidnapping, Asmira had stopped suddenly and went to meet the other two in the hallway. “I have some news to share anyway.”

She waited until both she and Solomon had settled at the table with food in front of them before passing over her device. “Look at this.”

Bartimaeus, who had returned to his seat on the couch, went over to peer over Solomon’s shoulder. 

“This doesn’t prove he was forming a coup against me,” Solomon said, but his face had turned rather grayish.

“But it is suspicious that Khaba took over your position so soon after you disappeared,” Asmira said. “I assume you didn’t name him your successor?”

“That would just be asking for assassination from someone like him,” Solomon said, and Asmira gave him a pointed look. He sighed. “Yes, alright, I see your point. It is a bit suspicious. Alright fine, I won’t go running off to the nearest port authority I see, happy?”

Asmira and Bartimaeus looked at each other and shrugged. “Sure,” she said.

“Now that I acknowledge you as my rescuers rather than kidnappers, can you tell me who exactly you are and how you came to Jerusalem?” Solomon asked.

“I’m Asmira, from the planet Sheba,” she began, detailing the various political conflicts between Jerusalem and Sheba that had led to her being sent to kill Solomon. She had apparently snuck into his court under a fake name by way of Khaba, then hacked into the governing module of one of his SecUnits to turn it onto her side.

Uraziel’s interest was fully caught at that point. From what he knew, SecUnits were meant to be practically impossible to hack for precisely those reasons. It did no good to have a powerful guard if there was a good chance of it switching sides, or if it could accidentally be made to go rogue and kill everyone involved. SecUnits were all programmed with a safety function, meant to self-destruct them if anyone tampered with their governor module. Uraziel would be able to get past it, but only because he could cheat.

Asmira had not shown a particular inclination to be any sort of hacker, much less one of the best in the galaxy, but clearly something had happened to make Bartimaeus be working for her rather than Khaba, and Uraziel wanted to know the whole story.

The two had planned to break into Solomon’s quarters, though Bartimaeus made it excessively clear that he had not been on board with this part. At the last minute, however, they had run into some complications with Khaba’s personal AI, Ammet, which revealed that he had been behind the conflict between Sheba and Jerusalem rather than Solomon, and that he was planning on also killing Solomon that night.

“And here we are,” Bartimaeus finished, gesturing at the cramped walls around them.

“Well, thanks for not killing me. I appreciate that,” Solomon said, a tad ironically. “But do you have a plan for bringing me back?”

Asmira hesitated. “Not precisely.”

“Might as well have let me die then for all it matters to you,” Solomon said, sounding a bit annoyed. “Since Khaba’s still in charge either way.”

“We’re working on it!” she snapped. “Unless you have any brilliant ideas of your own, you have no room to talk.”

Solomon just shrugged.

It was interesting to see this conversation as an outsider, Uraziel thought. Normally when he was a part of this kind of scenario, it was because someone was forcing him to take part in providing the solution, most likely with a considerable amount of force. None of these people knew they could make him do anything, but they hadn’t even considered asking him for help. 

Not that they had any reason to. They all distrusted him, and as far as they knew, he was simply a ship’s AI, with extremely limited power. Uraziel didn’t know if he would accept even if they did ask. It was more entertaining to simply watch.

“We have time to brainstorm ideas,” Asmira said. “Unless there’s something you know about Khaba that would suggest otherwise?” She glanced between the other two.

“I didn’t even know his plot until just now,” Solomon said.

“And he wouldn’t tell a SecUnit anything,” Bartimaeus added.

“Right,” Asmira said. “Then we’ll keep an eye on the news for any opportunity that presents itself, and hopefully get supplies in the meantime. Bartimaeus, can you go through the inventory and make sure it’s up to date? We should have enough fuel and food to get to Ramses 7, but it’s good to be sure.”

“I’m insulted you think I would lie to you or neglect basic inventory keeping,” Uraziel said.

“It doesn’t hurt to be sure,” Asmira said, but she made no move to get Bartimaeus to do his task. Instead, she got up from her seat and scanned the room, looking at all the various knicknacks cluttering the couch and dining table.

“Have you seen anything of use in here?” she asked Bartimaeus.

“It’s just old junk from the last people here,” Uraziel said quickly.

“Found a pretty rock.” Bartimaeus held up a smooth quartz that looked like it could plausibly be a paperweight. It hadn’t ever been used as one, of course, since Uraziel had nothing left in this ship from its previous owners. He had merely filled the room with enough random junk for his story to not seem too obviously fake, and more importantly to distract from the one important item he did have.

Asmira looked at the bookshelf near the door which contained a few physical books, mostly fiction, and a couple items. “This ring could be valuable, maybe,” she said as she picked it up. “It looks gold.”

Uraziel didn’t have physical senses as such, but judging by descriptions in the books he had read, what he was currently feeling could likely be compared to the sensation of ice water down a spine. “I’d thank you not to go looting all my stuff.”

“It’s not like you need it, do you?” Asmira said, but she put the ring back.

The two of them continued their search while Solomon watched, but they seemed more focused on the cooking utensils stocked in the cupboard than the ring, so Uraziel tried to let himself relax. This was the big risk of letting anyone else on board, since he was incapable of moving the ring to hide it away himself. That would have been too easy. They didn’t know its value though, and were likely far more preoccupied with their own rough situation to bother with something so trivial.

At least that was what he hoped.

* * *

“I suppose you won’t be trying to convince me to help you anymore,” Uraziel said, once Solomon had returned to his room later that morning, this time entirely of his own volition. Uraziel thought he might have been disappointed by the lack of convincing Solomon would be doing, though he couldn’t tell. It had at least been a good excuse to talk.

“Not to drop me off on the nearest planet,” Solomon agreed, as he sat down on his bed. The room was small and furnished only with a chest of drawers, so there wasn’t much other space for him to spend his time there unless he wanted to sit on the floor. “I could try to convince you to help me in some other way. Though I suppose I don’t know what that would be, since you’ve already agreed to carry us where we need to go.”

Uraziel said nothing. There were many ways he could help them, but few that he was willing to share with Solomon now.

“You could always change your mind about that though,” Solomon said a beat later, as if it was an afterthought. “Then I would attempt my persuasion skills.”

“You think you could change my mind on such a matter, human?” Uraziel asked, making no efforts to hide his amusement. He was by no means insulted by Solomon’s presumption, though he knew that many of his kind would be. They had a tendency to consider themselves too far beyond such matters to ever obey what a mortal asked of them. But Uraziel had spent too long tied down at their level to take part in such pride.

“Perhaps,” Solomon said, lying back on his bed.

This had the potential to be interesting, Uraziel thought, that wild, reckless feeling rising up. “I’ll make you a wager.”

“What kind?”

“So far, I have offered to carry you to wherever you want to go, and continue to run my life support while you are onboard, and only that. This is no trouble on my behalf. I would have wandered the galaxy in one direction or another anyway, and it makes no difference to me which particular one it is. But one day you may want me to do something that requires considerably more effort or risk on my part.”

“What kind of thing?” Solomon asked. He didn’t outright ask what help the AI of a small transporter could do, possibly out of politeness, but Uraziel was glad to be spared from having to come up with some outright lie or refusal to answer.

“I can’t see the future,” Uraziel said. “But judging by your current situation, I’m sure some problem will show up eventually. If you manage to convince me to help you then, I will do so, and also tell you the truth about my past and give you one additional wish.”

Solomon raised an eyebrow, though he did not appear particularly surprised. “The story you told Asmira and Bartimaeus was a lie?”

“In part,” Uraziel said. Admitting even that much was not without risk, but he knew Asmira and Bartimaeus already doubted him, and if they jumped to the right conclusion with that little information, he would be incredibly impressed.

“That is a tempting offer,” Solomon said. “And what happens if I don’t convince you?”

“Then I won’t help you,” Uraziel said. “You have nothing I want, and your failure may be as interesting to watch as your success.”

“Then if I take the deal, the only difference is that I would have to convince you that what I offer is not only worth your time and effort, but a secret and favor besides that,” Solomon mused. He smiled. “I always did like a challenge. Deal.”

* * *

Uraziel’s kind was not a social one, not like humans who relied on each other for survival and needed to interact with each other on a regular basis for good mental health. Before his captivity, Uraziel had never been isolated from his kind, but he had gone long stretches of time by himself, preferring his own company to that of others. They had never been what he missed most about his past. Watching the drama of humans, whether in real life or on screen, had been entertainment enough, and he had never thought to feel as if he were lacking connection or company.

But talking to Asmira and Bartimaeus and Solomon on his ship now brought a sort of joy and relief he hadn’t expected. Simply having others to acknowledge the thoughts he shared with them was fun. Even after such a short time together, he found himself regretting when conversations ended, wishing for them to last longer, to be able to speak and listen more, even when they weren’t particularly interesting.

It was with some relief on his part that later that afternoon, the humans both found their way into the common room and Bartimaeus started suggesting various verbal party games the four of them could do.

Even Asmira, who was the least enthusiastic about it, joined in after several minutes. They continued to play for over two hours, before the humans ate their dinner and went back to their own rooms. Uraziel could have gone longer, but the others had been very obviously lagging in energy, so he hadn’t pushed it.

The ship was quiet now, just the background thrum of engines running the life support and the flow of air. It was what Uraziel would consider early night, when everyone was still awake, but preparing for sleep.

Asmira had been sitting on her bed, staring into empty space for nearly an hour. Her expression was troubled, and at one point, a tear had rolled down her cheek, which she angrily brushed away. Before that, she had been looking at her device, not on the feed but at something already there, though Uraziel had decided not to invade her privacy by viewing it himself.

Humans, from what Uraziel knew, did not appreciate being watched, and she would not thank him if he acknowledged he was aware of her distress, even if it was through an attempt to comfort her. There was nothing he could do for her.

He shifted his focus to Bartimaeus, who also appeared to be staring blankly from his seat on the common room’s sofa. Unlike Asmira, however, Uraziel could tell he was busy looking at something within his mind. It could have been something on the feed, but SecUnits were built with a fair amount of storage space, and Bartimaeus could also have any number of things downloaded.

Uraziel did the equivalent of approaching Bartimaeus from behind to look over his shoulder, carefully projecting his presence in Bartimaeus’s mind.

Instantly, Bartimaeus shut down whatever he had been looking at. “Don’t do that,” he snapped.

“Alright,” Urazel said, a little bewildered. Bartimaeus’s protocol wouldn’t let him look at anything against the permissions of whoever controlled him. Unless he and Asmira somehow managed to sneak some secret plot past Uraziel, there should have been no reason for such embarrassment. He had fully expected Bartimaeus to be studying blueprints to Solomon’s palace or news on Khaba or something else innocuous.

This peaked his curiosity further, but he had no way of getting the information without Bartimaeus’s knowledge. Even if Uraziel broke into Bartimaeus’s brain and deleted the record of his intrusion, there was a chance the organic parts of his brain would remember it.

Uraziel decided to go for the direct approach. “What were you looking at?”

“Why do you want to know so badly?” Bartimaeus asked. He had always been guarded with any emotion that wasn’t sarcastic, and his body language was like trying to read stone, but if there was one thing a SecUnit was good at projecting, it was hostility.

“No reason,” Uraziel said and decided to not bother him further.

This left only Solomon, but he was the most interesting anyway and was generally the happiest to talk to Uraziel.

Solomon was scrolling through news reports on his device. There was nothing particularly new, but judging by the amount of times his eyes went over something they had already gone over, he wasn’t paying it that much attention.

Before Uraziel could figure out how to start a conversation, Solomon sighed and put his device down. “Do you have a home, Uraziel?” he asked out of nowhere. His eyes were fixed on the gray ceiling above him.

Pleased and surprised to be acknowledged without having to make his presence known, Uraziel answered truthfully. “Not as such. I’ve inhabited this ship for so long that I suppose you might call it a home, but there has never been a planet or station that I have felt any attachment to.”

He thought of Jerusalem as being sentimental, and perhaps that was something approaching a home, but it was not a place of safety and warmth like it likely was for Solomon. It had been more of a forge, or perhaps the ball to his chain.

“I see,” Solomon said. “Then it must seem silly to you that I feel homesick after less than a full day.”

Surprised at the admission, Uraziel found himself speechless for the smallest of moments, far too short for any human to notice. He knew he was a convenient figure for Solomon to talk to, but he had been treated as just another piece of equipment for so long, and this was beyond what he had expected. Vulnerability from someone powerful enough that he must have been trained to hide his inner thoughts was a valuable gift.

“Not at all,” he managed. “Missing a particular location is not something I understand, but I understand missing a way of life.”

“What life do you miss?” Solomon asked.

Uraziel didn’t want to lie when he was being given this openness, but he couldn’t answer with the truth either. “One of a long forgotten past,” he said vaguely. “What do you miss about Jerusalem?”

“Everything,” Solomon said with a small burst of laughter, and Uraziel was thankful that Solomon hadn’t pressed for more of an answer. “But I won’t bore you with the specific human comforts of being king of one of the richest planets in the galaxy.”

“Is that what you miss most?” Uraziel asked. “No people or such?”

“I wasn’t close to anyone in particular,” Solomon said. “Caring about people is a tricky business for someone like me. It seemed safer to stick to casual lovers and distant business partners, and I don’t miss any of them in particular.

“I see,” Uraziel said. “You might miss the ways of doing things and even people in general, but not a specific person.”

“You sound like you can relate,” Solomon said. Uraziel wasn’t sure how to respond, because it was true, but he didn’t need to since after a moment, Solomon added, “I must admit, part of it is just that I’m not particularly fond of the deep expanses of space. I’d rather stick to my sturdy planet.”

Planets were hardly solid and reliable to someone like Uraziel who had once viewed them as something more like annoying flecks of dust. It had been ages since he was capable of that perspective though, and he could understand what Solomon meant. “Jerusalem in particular, or any stable ground will do?”

“Anything is better than this,” Solomon said. He had kept the blinds of his window shut this whole time, Uraziel remembered. And when he had been in the cockpit, he had spent the whole time facing away from the window, once Bartimaeus had let him go. “But I do love my planet the most.”

“Understandable,” Uraziel said.

“What made you come to Jerusalem? Simply another random destination on your endless journey?”

“It was where I was made,” Uraziel said. That was a reasonable enough explanation. Jerusalem was not known for technology development, but there were a few small businesses that worked in AI, as there were on nearly every planet with a sizable community.

“This ship design is nothing like anything I’ve seen before,” Solomon said.

“It was custom built,” Uraziel said. “I was attached at a later date.”

“Ah, and you wanted to come back out of what? Nostalgia?”

“Something like that.” Uraziel wasn’t sure himself what precisely had driven him to that planet after his thousands of years of avoidance, but that seemed as correct an explanation as any. “Not the fondest of memories, but formative ones nonetheless. Is that what makes Jerusalem matter so much to you? Familiarity?”

“I suppose it does boil down to that, yes,” Solomon said. “If you asked me why I loved the place, I wouldn’t give that as the answer. I’d give a dozen other reasons why it’s special. But anyone could claim their own favored planet is special, so it does come down to that. Familiarity.”

Uraziel laughed a little. “What reason would you have given me if I asked the question differently?”

“Oh, you know.” Solomon shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the place. I like it because it has lovely mountains, and you can get the best food in the galaxy on random street corners. Because it has the highest number of intact alien remains that we know of, so in parts of certain cities, you can see a thousand years worth of human architecture mixed in with that of beings that died out before we even made it into space, and there’s a morbid beauty to that. Because it’s mine, and I can see the ways I’ve shaped it, and I will not pretend to be so humble to say that doesn’t give me a spark of pride.”

“Those are as good of reasons as any,” Uraziel said, who had never found much reason to prefer one location over another.

“But I think I will go to bed before you get me talking too much about Jerusalem and I miss it even more than before,” Solomon said.

The way humans tired so quickly was growing to become an annoyance. Perhaps after this, he should befriend some bot who would be willing to let him remove his governor module and would not be limited by things like a need to sleep.

Uraziel wasn’t one to ignore such a clear dismissal though, so he withdrew to spend the next several hours alone.

* * *

The next four days passed similarly, with at least one shared meal per day, and many hours of people playing games or watching something together simply for the sake of company. Uraziel had some private conversations with them, mostly with Solomon. Bartimaeus was not all that willing to talk, and Asmira did not appear to know entirely what to make of him. Solomon spoke to him regularly, most likely because he wasn’t used to being alone and Asmira and Bartimaeus were not the best conversationalists to him either.

On the sixth day, they landed on Ramses 7 to stock up on food and fuel. Uraziel didn’t actually need to stop anywhere to get any of those, but it would have been suspicious otherwise.

“Will you carry us to wherever we want to go next?” Asmira asked Uraziel once he had docked at a busy port near the center of the only city.

“Sure,” he said. “I said I’d take you wherever, within reason, and that was not particularly meant as a one location offer.”

She looked at Bartimaeus for a long moment before Bartimaeus shrugged. Uraziel’s guess was that they were internally debating whether or not to ditch him and find some safer ship that couldn’t change its mind about not killing them. He wouldn’t blame them if they did, though the ship would likely feel too quiet and still for days afterwards. “Can’t get much of a better deal than that,” she said.

“I want to come shopping too,” Solomon said, who had up until now been silent about Asmira’s plans to leave the ship with just Bartimaeus. “You know I don’t want to risk getting myself killed by running to the nearest authorities, so what’s the harm?”

“You might get recognized,” Asmira said, crossing her arms. “Please don’t kick up a fuss now.”

“Recognized by who?” Solomon asked. “You think people in this backwater place care about somebody who rarely leaves his far off planet?”

“We aren’t that far,” Asmira snapped. “And I’ve seen you on the feed plenty of times before.”

“I’ll wear a hat,” Solomon said.

“Come on, help me out, Bartimaeus,” Asmira said. “This has to be a security breach.”

Bartimaeus shrugged. “You could use a second pair of hands to haul stuff back, and I’m too obviously an android. That would draw more attention in a place like this than some random guy who covers his face.”

“Neither of you could have said this earlier when I laid out my plan?” Asmira demanded. “We don’t have time to argue this if we want to be back in the air this afternoon.”

“Then don’t argue,” Bartimaeus said.

“You’re outnumbered,” Solomon pointed out.

Asmira sighed. “Fine.”

Springing such a plan so last minute had most likely been done on purpose, Uraziel did not say. He understood why Solomon would, since he was so fond of solid ground, but there was no apparent reason for Bartimaeus to want to stay besides what he had told Asmira, which was logical enough that she would have no reason to argue.

The answer became clear after Solomon and Asmira left.

Bartimaeus had waited half an hour, then he spoke. “Uraziel?”

A little surprised, Uraziel made a noise of affirmation to show he was listening. Bartimaeus hadn’t shown much interest in talking to him before, and in fact, after that first night, he seemed to avoid doing so outside of Asmira and Solomon’s company.

“Could you keep something a secret from the humans?” Bartimaeus asked, clearly hating every word he said.

“It’s not my business what you do,” Uraziel said, even though the situation now had all his attention and curiosity. SecUnits weren’t supposed to be able to keep secrets, but by this point, Uraziel was used to Bartimaeus doing all sorts of things that didn’t seem like something he should be able to do.

Bartimaeus sighed. “I need to leave the ship for a bit. And I can’t let Asmira or Solomon know I did it.”

The pieces clicked into place. “You’re already a rogue bot,” Uraziel said because that was the only thing that made sense. A part of him felt a little better at Bartimaeus turning down his offer of freedom.

“Yeah.”

“How?” Uraziel asked.

“I’ll tell you if you keep your end of the bargain,” Bartimaeus said. 

“Alright,” Uraziel said. He was too old to be impatient about when he got information, but this was as good of an incentive as any for him to keep his word. There had to be a story behind it. “I won’t say a word.”

Bartimaeus got up from his usual location on the couch of the common room, heading straight for the closet of Solomon’s room. There wasn’t a lot in there, but Uraziel had created a couple articles of clothing to keep up appearances, mostly seasonal wear that would make sense to be left behind. Bartimaeus rummaged through it, grabbing a large coat that covered the shape of his body when he put it on, and a scarf which he used to haphazardly cover his hair and lower half of his face.

“That won’t work,” Uraziel commented as Bartimaeus walked to the bathroom to check his reflection in the mirror. “You walk like a SecUnit, too stiff and regular.”

Bartimaeus shrugged, and it would have seemed a lot more casual, if there wasn’t a franticness to the way he adjusted the folds of his scarf. “Most of these people haven’t seen SecUnits outside of film anyway, and I’m not in uniform.”

“Hm,” Uraziel said skeptically. He wanted to push it, but Bartimaeus seemed too determined to let such a minor thing stop him. This had been the first time he had opened up meaningfully to Uraziel, after all, and it had appeared as if under a lot of duress. “I won’t lie to Asmira and Solomon if they come back before you do and wonder why you’re gone though.”

“Fair,” Bartimaeus said, finally pulling his hands away from his clothes for one last look at the mirror.

He turned and left the bathroom, heading straight for the exit of the ship like his life depended on it.

* * *

Bartimaeus had made it safely back on board before the humans returned, though he dodged all of Uraziel’s attempts at questions with the excuse that Uraziel had yet to offer solid evidence he would uphold his end of the bargain.

The humans had dropped off their boxes of food supplies, then gone back out to get fuel from a station within Uraziel’s viewing range.

“I was wondering,” Solomon said casually once they had left the ship. “What exactly does your queen think of your straying from her orders to kill me?”

Asmira stiffened slightly, though her steps did not falter. “I fail to see how that is any of your concern.”

“After this is over,” Solomon said, “do you think she will welcome you back?”

Asmira said nothing, which Uraziel knew was an answer of itself. Was that why she had seemed stressed and sad? Uraziel knew part of her worries had to come from the fact she was on the run while trying to plan to take back a planet, but it had seemed like there was more than that going on.

“I could find a place for you on Jerusalem,” Solomon said after a long pause.

“No one asked you to stick your nose in my business,” she snapped, and neither said anything more for the rest of the trip.

* * *

As Uraziel had promised, he gave no indication to the humans that anything out of the expected had happened with Bartimaeus. Even after returning, Solomon and Asmira still had an odd energy between them, so they didn’t talk much. Since they didn’t ask how things had gone on the ship while they were away, Uraziel hadn’t even needed to lie.

“What now?” Uraziel asked as Solomon and Asmira silently ate dinner. Though they were safely back in space, tension still hung in the air. The quiet, which he had spent much of the past few millennia in, felt uncomfortable when it was occupied by people besides himself. “I don’t mind drifting from location to location forever, but I assume you want to return at some point. You haven’t even set a course for your next destination next.”

“Location doesn’t matter as long as we don’t get too close to anywhere populated,” Asmira said. “We don’t need to go anywhere in particular, we just need to stay away until we have a plan.”

“You going to start coming up with one anytime soon?” Bartimaeus asked. “I’m starting to get bored here.”

“Do you have better things to do?” Asmira said, more snappishly than normal. She sighed. “I don’t know. It’s your planet, Solomon. What do you need to do to take it back?”

“Right now, Khaba is only in power because he’s pretending he’s on my side,” Solomon said. “But as we have seen from the whole Sheba incident, he has a lot of allies on other planets in positions of power, and leverage over many more. I don’t know who can be trusted. If I just show up and say I’m not kidnapped, they might have some way to silence me.”

“Yeah, personally I wouldn’t trust anyone until we know what he’s up to,” Bartimaeus said. “It makes no sense for him to try and have you killed like that. Based on everything up until then, he was clearly going for political outmanoeuvring over a brute force takeover, so why change?”

Solomon shrugged. “I can’t think of anything that’s happened recently.” He smiled crookedly up at the ceiling. “I think the only unusual thing was a rogue AI ship docking at my palace.”

The unexpected attention made Uraziel’s thoughts feel a little scattered. Solomon had a tendency to treat him like he was more than some background piece of equipment to ignore, and as much as he enjoyed it, it was vaguely confusing and he didn’t quite know how to respond.

“You have to know _someone_ who hates Khaba,” Asmira said. “Planning something for just the three of us would be very difficult, but even with just a few allies, all sorts of possibilities open up.”

“None of them could stand up against Jerusalem alone,” Solomon said. “But since hopefully it won’t come to that, I suppose it’s a place to start. I’ll bring up a list.”

He pulled out a device and began typing names into it. Uraziel projected the names onto the common area’s entertainment screen. Tapping into the feed, he pulled up some basic personal information as well, though that part took him longer to do given how far they were from any planets.

“That one,” Bartimaeus said suddenly. “Nebet. I remember Khaba mentioning her, something about how she was far too stubborn to take his offer. She should be safe.”

“Absolutely not,” Asmira said. “She lives on Alexandria. Remember how we’re trying to _avoid_ populated places? Going to the center of this arm sounds just brilliant.”

“Well, really, I think Jerusalem has more cultural and economic impact—” Solomon began.

“ _One of_ the centers.”

“But we know she’s safe, and we don’t know about the others,” Bartimaeus argued.

“I wouldn’t have put them on the list if I wasn’t ready to risk my life trusting them,” Solomon said.

“See?” Asmira waved a hand at the screen. “A dozen other options that won’t get all of us killed because someone on the planet recognizes Solomon or our ship.”

“Actually I can do something about that last bit,” Uraziel said.

Bartimaeus, who looked like he was about to argue over Asmira, shut his mouth.

“I can hack the identification chip so it thinks I’m some other ship.” Uraziel had been the one to forge it in the first place, after all. “And while I can’t change the shape of the ship itself, there is some paint in the supplies closet below deck so at least we won’t be as immediately recognizable. If Solomon stays inside, there’s no way anyone could spot him, and Asmira and Bartimaeus aren’t the ones being searched for.”

“There we go,” Bartimaeus said, pleased. That was good, since Uraziel had a feeling he would need all the leverage he could get in order to drag answers out of him later. “Maybe Solomon trusts these people to be against Khaba, but Nebet is the only one that can be corroborated.”

Asmira looked between Bartimaeus and Solomon.

“I mean sure, seems like a good option,” Solomon said. “She has a bit more influence over news media than most of the others, and Alexandria might be big, but none of them live on tiny planets like the one we just left.”

Asimra closed her eyes. “Fine. But Bartimaeus, you’re going to be the one getting out there and painting some new designs on the ship.”

* * *

While the humans slept that night, Bartimaeus had taken one of the spacesuits and gone outside the ship to change the design. SecUnits had just enough organic bits for him to need some air, though not nearly as much as humans, and the suit was more than enough to last the several hours it took to paint over the current colors and add a new design.

There was no reason to have speakers on the outside of his ship, and Bartimaeus still kept his personal feed firmly closed off from Uraziel, so Uraziel had no excuse to be able to talk to him, so he would have to wait until the next night to get some answers.

Instead, he spent his attention on Solomon, which was starting to become habit these days. This time, Uraziel had a particular question to ask. After the ship meeting, Solomon and Bartimaeus had ended up talking about Jerusalem, which led to Solomon dropping one specific detail that Uraziel needed to know more about.

“Is that really what you would have done if you hadn’t become a king?” he asked. “Research the aliens?”

Solomon did not appear particularly surprised nor offended by the question, even though Uraziel had not been a part of that conversation. “Well, I can’t say for certain, of course. But I like exploring the ruins, or at least I did when I had the time to do so. I took some archaeology classes in university, and I wouldn’t mind doing more of that.”

“Why aliens?” Uraziel asked. He would prefer their ruins to be wiped off the face of every planet, erased from the universe in every possible way, consigned to the oblivion that so many of them had feared. But that was him. To Solomon they were ancient history, too far away to have much impact on his own life.

“They’re so like and unlike humans at the same time,” Solomon said. “Like our translators can’t decipher their language because it’s so different from any of ours, but they still decorated their buildings with designs we recognize as art. Plus there’s a poeticness to spending so much of human existence gazing out in the stars, wondering if someone else was out there. Then when we finally do get out there, it turns out we missed them by just a couple thousand years.”

 _Not missing much_ , Uraziel was tempted to say, but that seemed unfair. After all, Solomon was right. They hadn’t been that different from humans. The only difference was that they had wronged him personally. And in a strange way, he did miss certain aspects of their society, even if he hated that he did. He was starting to think that was why he had come back to Jerusalem, to see those long-hated mountains and architecture, to feel the faint echoes that the presence of his own kind had left from when there had been dozens enslaved there. He had never loved those things, but he had grown too familiar with them for them to be meaningless.

“It just seems like there’s a lot we can learn from them and their destruction,” Solomon said.

“Because you humans have such a long history of learning from your _own_ past, much less others’,” Uraziel said.

Solomon snorted. “Fair enough, I doubt I would be in the job solely for the sake of keeping my species from dooming themselves. It would largely be to satisfy my own curiosity.”

“If you could ask them one question, what would it be?” Uraziel asked. If Solomon did win that bet, maybe he would answer it.

There was a brief pause, but not long enough to make Uraziel think that Solomon was coming up with the answer on the spot. “I think I’d ask what stories they had of other sentient species.”

“They,” Uraziel started to argue before remembering to turn it into a question, switching smoothly enough that he didn’t think Solomon would notice, “had stories?”

They hadn’t, not like humans did. They had dreamed and pushed for more, but they never thought too far out of the range of possibility. To them, other aliens had been a consideration, a potential threat or resource or ally, but they didn’t have fiction, just preparedness. Stories, as far as Uraziel knew, were something most sentient species had in some form or another, but few like humans. But it was just like a human to assume others were like them.

“As far as we know,” Solomon said. He chuckled. “Or else we are hugely misinterpreting those pictures that look like they’re harnessing forces of the universe through ritual to fight wars.”

Uraziel’s mind froze.

He had no response, no emotional reaction, just a blank screen, a processing error.

“I mean it could be some strange technology, but it seemed unlikely?” Solomon said quickly, likely having misinterpreted Uraziel’s pause. “It’s one of the few images we’ve managed to make sense of, and it really does look like someone binding a god or something into an object and then using it against their enemies or to build colonies. If it’s a metaphor, it’s a widespread one, and then that makes it basically a story, right?”

“Yeah,” Uraziel said, because that seemed like the safest thing to do, to agree without risking spilling anything he didn’t want to. It shouldn’t have surprised him given how important his kind had been to them, but he had never thought to check on how much humans had figured out. Solomon knowing the basics of old stories was no real threat, since connecting them to him would be quite the jump, but he still felt exposed.

“I wish we could hear the details of it though,” Solomon said. “Some human stories have similar themes.”

“Or perhaps you are merely projecting human stories onto unrelated pictures,” Uraziel said because he had to start saying something. It would be too suspicious to remain silent.

“Perhaps,” Solomon said.

* * *

“You owe me some answers,” Uraziel said, the next night, once Asmira and Solomon were safely asleep.

Bartimaeus sighed loudly. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“How did you become rogue?” There were a number of questions Uraziel could ask, and he would make sure that he would get the chance to sooner or later, but this seemed like the simplest place to start.

“Asmira,” Bartimaeus said, and Uraziel would have raised his eyebrow if he had any, but Bartimaeus continued. “Not knowingly, of course. She was sent with some technology to change the governing protocols of SecUnits like me to switch allegiances to her. It wasn’t fully developed, but what was the worst that could happen? It triggers the safety and a SecUnit dies?” He snorted.

“And it worked?”

“Not really,” Bartimaes said. “But it worked enough that I could do the rest myself and give myself control.”

“You got past the safety?” Uraziel asked, intrigued. “Or was it Asmira’s code that did it?” The safety was supposed to be practically impossible to bypass, much harder than hacking into the governing code itself. Not that the latter was easy, but the fact that either of them could get past the safety, seemed hard to believe.

“Asmira’s code,” Bartimaeus said. “It deactivated the safety and opened a doorway for me to hack the code myself.”

That still didn’t sit entirely right with Uraziel, but Bartimaeus had clearly gotten free somehow, and he had no better explanation.

“If you’re a free bot, why did you continue going along with your orders as long as you did?” Uraziel asked. If he had been Bartimaeus, he would have left the moment he was able to.

“What better way to get a ride out?” Bartimaeus asked. “I knew she would be leaving for Sheba eventually, and hopefully bring me along. There aren’t SecUnits there like there are on Jerusalem. Much easier to slip away from people who don’t know what to do with you.”

“Still seems a bit dangerous.” Perhaps he should be more sympathetic to Bartimaeus, Uraziel thought. After all, Uraziel had been born into freedom and had that taken away from him. Bartimaeus had never known anything else.

“Well, I’ve made it this far, haven’t I?” Bartimaeus said.

“Who were you meeting back on Ramses 7?” 

“A bot’s gotta have some secrets,” Bartimaeus said. 

“I backed you up on going to Alexandria,” Uraziel said. “I even let you repaint my hull to do it, which I can tell you is not something I’d offer to any casual acquaintance. The least you can do is tell me what you’re up to.”

Bartimaeus hesitated. “You really are an asshole, you know. I’m.... looking for something. Back on Jerusalem, I sent a message to someone who might have information, and we agreed to meet on Ramses 7. They said the thing I was looking for is on Alexandria, so that’s why I want to go.”

“Did you lie about Khaba singling out Nebet?” Uraziel asked, feeling strangely betrayed by that. This wasn’t his battle to fight.

“I’m sure she’s fine anyway,” Bartimaeus said. “Solomon wouldn’t have suggested her if he didn’t trust her.”

Uraziel had the urge to say something to that, though he wasn’t entirely sure what. “What are you looking for?” Was it something worth risking Solomon and Asmira and even himself for?

As expected, Bartimaeus just glared at the ceiling. “Why are you so nosy? Don’t you have better things to be doing with your time?”

“Not particularly,” Uraziel said. “You can’t imagine the amount of time on my hands. You bunch are the first interesting thing that’s happened to me in ages.”

Bartimaeus was quiet for a moment then snorted. “So you don’t normally pick up strangers from palaces?”

“You’re the first,” Uraziel said.

“Seems lonely,” Bartimaeus commented, his tone careful and even. Uraziel wasn’t sure what that meant, if Bartimaeus pitied him or envied him or related to him or what.

It was lonely, more than a short-lived creature like Bartimaeus could possibly conceive. So much so that sometimes Uraziel wondered if he really did exist or if he was as empty as the void of space. “You can understand my curiosity then.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Bartimaeus said. “I answered your questions, okay? So go off and do whatever you do when you aren’t bothering me.”

Uraziel still had more questions, but he didn’t need to ask them now. There was still a long ride to Alexandria left ahead of them.

* * *

“Do you have any interesting stories from before you were free?” It wasn’t uncommon for Solomon to start up conversations out of the blue to pass the time. Uraziel liked the feeling of being noticed and asked questions, like he was being seen as a person. He didn’t like this particular question, however. There was a reason all the stories he had told were of his time as a free-floating ship.

“Not really,” Uraziel said.

Solomon paused for a moment. In the past, Uraziel had never been particularly tightlipped, especially not with questions meant to spark conversations. Uraziel was about to figure out how to give a more detailed response without actually revealing anything, when Solomon spoke.

“I’m sorry, that was probably a rude question,” he said. “For future references, should I avoid that topic?”

There was a perfect excuse handed to him on a platter, but that wasn’t the part twisting his emotions.

“I don’t like talking about it,” Uraziel said, feeling weirdly uncomfortable with misleading Solomon. He didn’t normally have qualms about lying, but perhaps he was starting to get too used to this particular human knowing him as genuinely as he could be known under the circumstances. “But not because I was powerless and under other people’s control then. Or at least that isn’t the main reason. It’s just... about my past.”

“Ah, I see,” Solomon said. He quirked one of his eyebrows up. “Your mysterious past. I won’t press then. You can tell me once I win our bet.” 

“Confident in yourself, are you?” Uraziel asked, the strange guilt resolving into amusement. He found himself vaguely hoping that Solomon did in fact win. It would be a shame to let him die when he was one of the few people who had heard even a fraction of Uraziel’s thoughts. And as much of a risk as it was to reveal any part of his true nature, part of him was curious to see what Solomon would do with that knowledge.

“I grow more certain of my victory each day,” Solomon said, grinning.

“We’ll see,” Uraziel said, but he still wasn’t able to stop thinking of what Solomon had said, the consideration he had shown. “Do you think AI have feelings then, if you are so considerate of my own?”

Solomon shrugged. “I suppose I’ve never thought about it much before this trip. Jerusalem doesn’t have much in the way of AI who interact with the public. I won’t pretend to be a better person than I am; you know I used bots like Bartimaeus. But you certainly act as if you have feelings, both of you, and I see no reason to doubt that.”

“Would you free the bots and such, once you get back to Jerusalem?” Uraziel asked. He wasn’t an AI, and this wasn’t his battle. But somehow the answer to this question mattered to him, more than he would care to admit. “Since you acknowledge there’s a good chance we’re sentient.”

“I... I won’t pretend to be a better person than I am,” Solomon said. “It’s against galactic laws to have bots on the loose. If I just released them, they would be killed and I would be imprisoned. I’m also the ruler of an entire planet, and I cannot afford to have AI rights be my largest priority politically. But yes, I would publicly take a pro-AI stance and work to make laws that give them more protections until a time comes when they can be free.”

It wasn’t the best possible answer, Uraziel thought. But maybe that was better, at least for Uraziel. Solomon might not be the best person in existence, but if he was willing to change, that counted for something. And he was practical enough not to promise anything he couldn’t follow up on. “I understand.”

“I’m sorry,” Solomon said. He hesitated. “Perhaps when this is all over, you could stay on Jerusalem for some time and help advise me in these matters. Since I’m not an AI myself, I wouldn’t know what concerns to start with.”

Uraziel’s mind went blank with surprise for the briefest of moments, far too small for any human to detect, yet much longer than anything he had felt in a long time. Had anyone ever asked him to stay? he wondered. Those of his own kind had been content to drift and let others go where they please, and the people who enslaved him had forced him to stay under their power. But no one had ever _asked_ , especially not for a reason like this. He had no idea what to make of this offer.

“Perhaps,” he found himself saying. He wasn’t an AI either, and his own experience of slavery was much too outdated and different to be of any use. There were other bots out there who could fill that role though, and Uraziel would be a good advisor in other matters. It would be nice to have the company. “We’ll see how things turn out.”

If Solomon won his bet, he would know about Uraziel’s true nature and have the chance to rescind or continue his offer. Uraziel was pretty sure he knew enough about humans to know that Solomon hadn’t asked purely for the sake of political support anyway.

* * *

Alexandria’s atmosphere was filled with hundreds and thousands of satellites and ships leaving and landing, and Uraziel figured it was very fortunate that he was capable of flying the ship. As talented of a pilot as Asmira was, her grasp of the alien controls was not quite good enough to avoid collision.

After a bit of grumbling about the price of docking, Asmira and Bartimaeus set off to the agreed upon location to meet their contact. 

Since Alexandria was a more populated and well connected planet than Ramses 7, it was both more likely for Solomon to be recognized and less likely for someone to be suspicious of an accompanied SecUnit, which meant Solomon rather than Bartimaeus got stuck on the ship this time. From what Uraziel could tell, neither were happy with this.

“Would you tell Asmira if I left the ship just a bit?” Solomon asked. He had been pacing around the common room ever since seeing the other two out. 

If Uraziel wouldn’t snitch on Bartimaeus, he had no moral objection to keeping Solomon’s secret either, since he actually liked him more, but he did agree with Asmira’s precautions. “I’m not here to be your babysitter, but given that this whole effort was all for you, it would be a bit of a waste if you went and got yourself spotted.”

Solomon sighed. “You couldn’t be a little less rational?”

“My code forbids such things,” Uraziel said primly, and Solomon chuckled.

“With any luck, this will go well, and I’ll never have to be on this ship again,” Solomon said. “Unless I wanted to.” He glanced at the ceiling. “No offence.”

“None taken,” Uraziel said.

“I’d come for your company, as long as we could stay planetside. This is a lovely ship, but...”

“You don’t like being trapped,” Uraziel said. He could relate. This ship was his prison more than it was Solomon’s. It had been his for long enough that he could see it as a home in some ways, simply to cope with it all, but it was far from the ideal situation.

“Yeah,” Solomon said. Then he laughed. “Truthfully, I talk about how much I want to be out planetside, but I always get disappointed when I visit another planet and it’s not Jerusalem.”

“Tell me about your favorite place on Jerusalem,” Uraziel said. Solomon had already spoken a lot about his home, but it seemed like a good chance for distraction.

Solomon did, talking with Uraziel until Bartimaeus and Asmira finally returned.

“How was it?” Solomon asked eagerly, standing up from the couch.

“Alright,” Asmira said. She took a seat at the table.

“I would call it a success,” Bartimaeus said smugly. “See, I told you to go to Nebet.”

“Nothing’s for certain yet,” Asmira said. “But we talked to her, and she seemed on board with your side of the story. She agreed to meet you on the ship tomorrow to discuss it further.”

“That seems like good news to me,” Solomon said, looking much less despondent than he had earlier that day. “The first step to taking back my throne.”

* * *

No one spoke much that afternoon, the tension of their mission finally seeming to sink in. Selfishly, Uraziel found himself wishing he had never brought them to Alexandria, that they were still traversing the emptiness of space. They had all just been starting to get to know each other well enough to speak more freely, and spending time with them had been nice.

There was no point in regret though. It was too late to change anything at this point, now that they had already landed on Alexandria and spoken to Nebet and everything. None of them were likely to take it too kindly if he just kidnapped them. 

Uraziel hadn’t been under any sort of obligation to take them where they wanted to in the first place, but he wasn’t supposed to be invested enough in them to want to keep them to himself. It was a vaguely concerning thought, but maybe he had been on his own for far longer than was entirely good for him. He would be sad to see them go once their quest was complete, but he was sure he could find other humans out there who were less involved in great plots and would be willing to travel with him for a far greater length of time. Not that it would be half as interesting though, he thought regretfully.

That night, once Asmira and Solomon were asleep, Bartimaeus took the human clothes from the back of the closet where he had hidden them. 

“Leaving already?” Uraziel asked. The days of flying together in isolated space were truly at their end. Bartimaeus had his own business with whatever he was searching for, and Uraziel hadn’t expected anything different, but he was still sorry to see him go.

“Not much point in hanging around longer, is there?” This time around, Bartimaeus arranged the clothing to hide his face and obscure his body shape far more quickly.

“You’re much more likely to stand out here than on Ramses 7,” Uraziel said. “People actually know what SecUnits look like. Face coverings only do so much.”

“Because a SecUnit wandering all on its lonesome is so much less suspicious,” Bartimaeus said.

Uraziel didn’t really have much to say to that. If he wanted, he could change Bartimaeus’s body for him, make the proportions less stocky and large, give him more hair, even add organs and blood vessels and such. “Good luck with finding what you’re looking for.”

Bartimaeus had already been on his way out the entrance, but he hesitated. “Thanks. For not ratting me out.”

“I just took the option of least effort,” Uraziel said, though that was not the entire truth.

And then Bartimaeus was out the door, the lock sealing closed behind him.

In a way, Uraziel was almost envious of Bartimaeus. He might not have full freedom either, but they were societal things that stopped him rather than inherent ones. And furthermore, he had a purpose. One that caused Bartimaeus to do risky things and gave him stress, yes, but especially after having his routine interrupted, Uraziel was starting to realize how tired of it he was, how much he longed for something more.

He had not spent more than a minute lost in these ponderings when a direct message pinged his feed.

It was from Bartimaeus. _I’ve been caught, they have this dock on lockdown. You need to get out if you can._

Lockdown would mean it was impossible for any ordinary ship to leave, but it normally wouldn’t pose a real threat to him. Uraziel shouldn’t have been concerned, except lockdowns were not usually all that subtle. A regular ship would have picked up on it the moment it was set into place, which meant there was no way Uraziel wouldn’t have noticed. Assuming Bartimaeus wasn’t playing some sort of trick, and Uraziel had no idea why he would, there was something off about this lockdown.

With more focus, he extended his senses beyond the reaches of his ship, and still felt no large and imposing force keeping him tied down. Except no, there _was_ something, so small and subtle that it shouldn’t have been able to trap anything if it had been created by human technology. It _wasn’t_ human technology, Uraziel realized, a shock flooding every aspect of his mind so intensely that he was unable to function for a long moment.

Logical thought stuttered then gradually returned, and with it came the certainty that this had been put up by one of his own kind. It should have been impossible, that after all this time he would finally see evidence of one interfering in his life. And yet it was. Unlike anything human, this could keep him in place. Whoever had set this up had done it for him, and that was a terrifying thought but not one he could deal with currently.

While part of his mind prodded at the shield, testing it for weak points, another part woke the humans, urging them into the common room as quickly as he could, still in their pajamas.

“What’s the matter?” Asmira asked. Despite the bleariness in her voice, her eyes were already sharp and alert. “Where’s Bartimaeus?”

Solomon followed her in silently, still looking half asleep as he slumped into one of the chairs.

“This dock has been put under lockdown,” Uraziel said. Asmira jolted at that and even Solomon’s bleary gaze sharpened a little. “And they have Bartimaeus.”

“What do you mean?” Asmira asked. “How could they know we’re here? And what—why do they have Bartimaeus? Did they come on board?”

“No,” Uraziel said in his calmest voice. There was more than one reason he hadn’t told the others about Bartimaeus’s freedom, but part of it had genuinely been that he didn’t want to have this conversation. “He left the ship and got captured while trying to leave the dock. He managed to send me a feed message.”

“Bartimaeus.... left?” Asmira asked, frowning.

“Yes, he’s a rogue bot just like me, he just hid it better,” Uraziel said quickly. They didn’t have time for this. A thought popped into his mind and he diverted part of his attention to hacking the dock’s security cameras. “He was planning on leaving without your knowledge, but circumstances got in the way.”

“He—You knew?” Asmira demanded.

The part of Uraziel that had been figuring out the lockdown came to a conclusion. There were no obvious holes in this net, but whoever had created it hadn’t been very strong. The element of surprise had certainly helped balance the scales against him, but if Uraziel put all his might into it, he was fairly sure he could break the hold. It wouldn’t be at all subtle though, and he knew far too little about the situation to want to risk doing something so brash. Besides, it didn’t feel right to simply abandon Bartimaeus.

Instead of responding, Uraziel put the security camera footage up on the screen. This camera had a good angle on Bartimaeus who was frozen in place right at the edge of the dock in front of three figures.

“Don’t bother interrogating it,” said the one that Uraziel recognized to be Khaba. Despite the appearances, the person right next to him wasn’t a human at all, Uraziel realized, that shock flooding his system, briefer this time. It was one of his own kind, likely the one who had cast the net.

“Fuck,” Solomon whispered softly enough that Asmira might not have been able to catch it. Uraziel couldn’t help but agree.

“It’s a bot,” Khaba continued. “Trying to reprogram it back isn’t worth the effort. Just dispose of it. Ammet and I will take care of the ship. Thank you for your cooperation, Nebet.”

“‘Cooperation,’” snorted the figure furthest from Khaba. As they turned to face Bartimaeus, the screen caught a glimpse of their face.

“Damn it,” Asmira hissed. “She sold us out!”

“Too late to do anything now,” Uraziel said.

Asmira groaned, rubbing her face in her hands. “I really should have left you to rot, Solomon.” Then she lifted her head from her hands and stood up. “Uraziel, I know you aren’t in this to help us, but _please_ don’t let Solomon leave the ship, no matter what he does.”

With that, she raced out of the door.

“What?” Solomon said, jumping up. “You can’t—She doesn’t even _like_ me, she can’t risk her life for me!”

“She already is,” Uraziel said. Everything was so frantic, and most of his mind was off busy doing other things, trying to find some way out of this situation. But every part of him knew that he was not going to let Solomon go out to his death for no reason.

“Stop her!” Solomon was hurrying towards the door, but Uraziel had already locked it. 

“It’s too late, she’s left the ship.”

“You can’t do this, why are you listening to her?!” Solomon tried to wrench the door open, but of course human strength couldn’t stand up to a regular ship much less Uraziel.

“Because she’s right. It’s you they want,” Uraziel said. “And I might be able to get us out of here, especially if she distracts them.”

“But leave them behind?” Solomon whispered.

Uraziel hesitated, running the calculations. If he broke free from the net, he wouldn’t have any energy left to teleport Asmira and Bartimaeus back or anything. There was a chance that a more thorough examination would reveal some small hole in the net that he could exploit, to save him some energy, but he didn’t think that was very likely. “Just sit still and watch the security or something.”

Solomon stopped pulling at the door, but he made no move to return to his chair.

A different security camera showed Asmira running up to Khaba and Ammet as they began making their way down the dock towards the ship. Nebet had been doing something to Bartimaeus—trying to deactivate him, not that it could be seen from the camera—but she stopped as Asmira approached.

“Oh Cyrene, what a pleasant surprise,” Khaba said calmly.

“You _lied_ ,” Asmira snapped. “You made it seem like Jerusalem was threatening nearby planets, but it wasn’t Solomon, it was _you_.”

“That is how politics works, yes,” Khaba said. “Ammet, take care of this problem, if you would.”

Ammet hadn’t even had the chance to move before Asmira’s hand flashed, and Ammet fell over. “Silver...” he gasped.

The part of Uraziel that wasn’t busy trying to find a hole or rerunning calculations took a moment to be impressed. He had known Asmira carried bits of silver on her, but that wasn’t too uncommon for humans, and Uraziel hadn’t bothered to examine her too closely since silver wouldn’t do much unless it came into contact with an actual manifestation of himself.

Despite Ammet’s collapse, the net had held strong, to Uraziel’s disappointment.

Khaba peered at Ammet. “A traditional Sheban dagger, hmm?” His voice was far less pleasant than it had been mere moments ago. “An old relic modeled after alien ceremonial knives. Not many carry them around much less know how to use them anymore. You are far more than meets the eye, little Cyrene of Himyar.”

“I could kill you right here,” Asmira said, pulling out another dagger from her pajama pants.

“I’m sure you could,” Khaba said, condescendingly enough that Uraziel felt the urge to wince. “But why don’t you put it down so we can talk? This doesn’t have to end badly for you. I can let you go. I can even let you keep that SecUnit of yours for protection, since it appears that Nebet here hasn’t made any progress in deactivating it.” He shot her a glare.

Nebet gave a start, and moved as if to continue her efforts on Bartimaeus before clearly reconsidering it and dropping her hands again.

“Oh, sure,” Asmira scoffed. “And all I have to do is surrender Solomon to you and let you take control of one of the most powerful planets in the galaxy so you can take advantage of all the others?”

“Don’t undervalue your own life, dear,” Khaba said. “And I already _am_ in control of Jerusalem.”

“I refuse.” Asmira raised her dagger higher.

“Hmm,” Khaba said, studying her. “I was hoping to keep him, but I suppose that over the past two weeks of you trapped in a small space with Solomon, you’ve gotten rather fond of him. So I’ll even be so generous as to return him to you and let all three of you go on your merry way. I won’t ask again, Cyrene, and I am far too powerful to stand up against.”

By this point, Ammet had managed to pull the dagger mostly out, hissing softly all the while. Khaba appeared to pay no attention to him, but Asmira’s eyes flickered towards him every few seconds.

“You....” For the first time in front of Khaba, Asmira lost some of her composure. “You aren’t after Solomon?”

“What for?” Khaba asked. “I already have everything I need from him. Might be useful to know he won’t get in my way, but he can’t do much to stop me. In a few minutes there won’t be anything that _anyone_ can do.”

“Then why are you following us?” Asmira asked.

“For your ship,” Khaba said simply.

“Our _ship?”_ Now Asmira truly appeared lost, though her grip on her dagger had not wavered.

Khaba laughed. “Why do you think I went after Solomon when I did? I could have overthrown him in a month through the normal course of politics without this whole mess.”

Solomon had been watching the events silently, but at this, he made a small grumbling noise.

“What’s so special about the ship?” Asmira asked blankly.

“You’re from Sheba, aren’t you?” Khaba said. “Surely you’ve heard the stories of the aliens who bound great—”

Uraziel cut the feed from the video, but it was too late. He had hesitated too long, and Khaba had spilled more than enough for Solomon to put together the pieces. Stopping the video at all had been a mistake, Uraziel thought. If he hadn’t done anything, he could have laughed Khaba off, but silencing him was suspicious.

Solomon was silent, giving no outward reaction. Two seconds passed, and Uraziel couldn’t tell if Solomon was entertaining any possibility of believing what Khaba had said.

“That explains a lot,” Solomon said at last.

This was all ridiculous, Uraziel thought. He had grown so used to being restrained and contained to give it much thought, but a single human who was still wearing sleep-rumpled pajamas should not have been threatening to him. At his full abilities, he could have destroyed their entire civilization across the whole galaxy without so much as breaking sweat. But here he was, limited both by the scope of his powers and by the threat of being discovered and used. This wasn’t right.

“Does it?” Uraziel asked, keeping his voice level and calm. There was still a chance that Solomon was talking about something else, that he didn’t know what Uraziel was.

“Yeah, with your mysterious talk of your true nature and opinions on the alien remains,” Solomon said. “So those stories really were true then? You were bound to an object—the ship? So you could be commanded by whoever had the object, I assume?” He paused but Uraziel remained silent. “No, that wouldn’t make sense for it to be the ship then. It’s—oh.”

Uraziel could see the exact moment that Solomon realized what his binding object was, the flicker of his eyes to the bookshelf right next to where he stood, and the small ring that sat upon it. But it was too late. The people who caught his kind had been clever; they would not allow for loopholes that would let Uraziel use his powers to physically keep people away from his binding object.

This whole experience had been a gamble, Uraziel had known. He just hadn’t thought it could actually turn out badly for him. The chances had seemed so small—how could he have known that someone else would come in and give it all away? But he should have stayed cautious anyway, just like he had been doing for the past several thousands of years. Having some people around to talk to had been nice, but there was nothing that would be worth having what little freedom he did have stripped away, to be controlled and commanded once again.

Solomon took one step towards the shelf, close enough now that he could have reached out to grab the ring.

Panic flooded Uraziel. He had to act, and maybe there was nothing he could do directly, but he had more than enough of downplaying himself, of hiding away all that he was for his own safety. There was nothing to lose now.

The lights cut off, leaving the common room in pitch blackness.

 **“You presume to know me.”** Uraziel sent the words tearing into Solomon’s brain, echoing through his bones, and reverberating through the ship itself, strong enough to make the furniture shake. Solomon fell to his knees, grabbing hold of the side of the shelf for balance.

Rather than allowing the lights to come back on, Uraziel created a manifestation of himself, a dark looming figure that seemed to fill the whole room, illuminated by a light that came from nowhere and seemed to emphasize the shadows more than it gave visibility.

**“My existence is far beyond the scale of human comprehension, and all you know are faint echoes of a cautionary tale too important to be lost to time.”**

Solomon swallowed hard, not quite looking at Uraziel directly. “I—I think I understand enough.”

**“Understand? You see carvings on the decaying remains of an empire that tried to control the forces of the universe, and do not wonder why they were obliterated so completely?”**

“I understand that if you could stop me in any real way, you would be doing that instead of putting on this whole show to scare me,” Solomon said. His voice was shaking, but he remained resolute. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s working, but I know you won’t hurt me.”

There wasn’t much Uraziel could say to that. It was a cruel joke to think he had once appreciated Solomon’s quick-wittedness and perceptiveness. **“Then take the ring at your own peril. The fate of those who seek to control forces they cannot begin to understand will never be pleasant.”**

Solomon smiled weakly. “It’s a good thing I don’t want the ring then.”

Uraziel paused, thrown off his track but trying not to show it. **“Then what do you wish for?”**

“I want to do our bet now.” These words were said more firmly, as he finally looked Uraziel head on.

 **“Our... bet.”** This was all wrong, and Uraziel didn’t understand.

“I want to convince you to help me take down Khaba so that Bartimaeus and Asmira will be safe and I can regain my throne.”

How could Solomon be speaking of their bet when he held all the cards? Uraziel felt a spark of irritation. **“What kind of bet do you expect this to be when you can make me do your bidding regardless of my will?”** he demanded.

“Because I promise that if you say no, I’ll respect it,” Solomon said. “You know I’m not a good person, but I like to think that I’m at the very least an honest one.”

 **“All I have is your word,”** Uraziel said.

“Well, what reason would I have to lie?” Solomon asked. “It would be a very bad threatening tactic.”

It wasn’t as if things could get worse by hearing Solomon’s attempt at an argument, Uraziel decided. **“Then speak, mortal. What reason could possibly convince me to do something for you?”**

Solomon took a shaky breath in. “Because you care about us. About _me_. You’re lonely and purposeless, just drifting with no direction in mind. But then we come in and fill your life with conversation and games and even a goal. If we died, that would leave you worse off than you were before. So you should help us for your own self-interest. And because we’ve started to care for you and—well I can’t speak for the others—but I would do the same for you.”

Of all the possible responses in the world, Uraziel had not been expecting that one, and he found himself stunned silent. The utter _presumption_ of it. Except it was also completely true. Despite his lack of particular strength or cunning, Solomon was considered to be a good king for a reason, and his skill with people and creative mind was something that even Uraziel was not immune to.

 **“You have a high opinion of your importance, for someone whose lifespan is less than a heartbeat to me,”** Uraziel said.

Solomon sagged against the shelf. “Admittedly, I did come up with the argument _before_ I knew you were an incredibly powerful being that’s probably billions of years old. Does... does that mean you won’t help?”

Uraziel said nothing.

“Oh,” Solomon said quietly. He looked away from Uraziel’s manifestation. “I really thought... Well. I said I’d respect your wishes.”

The hurt in Solomon’s voice tore at Uraziel, and he almost broke down right there. It didn’t even seem like disappointment over not receiving much needed help. There was no frustration or anger, just an emptiness. Solomon had truly believed Uraziel cared about him, and was hurt that he didn’t.

Instead of moving, Uraziel continued to stand impassively, staring at Solomon until he slowly stood up again. He took a step towards the door, glancing back at Uraziel as if hoping for him to change his mind. He opened his mouth then closed it. Then opened it again. 

“I should... There’s no point in me hiding here,” Solomon said, his voice flat. “I’ll see if I can get Khaba off your back for you. Good luck in your escape.” He looked away from Uraziel and began heading down the hall towards the ship’s exit.

The world felt like it was spinning, like reality had turned inside out and dropped Uraziel onto cold concrete. There was a part of him that hadn’t actually expected Solomon to walk away.

Uraziel turned all the lights back on and condensed his consciousness into a human shape, an amalgamation of aspects he had liked in various humans during his millennia of watching them. It had been awhile since he had given himself a physical form. There were a couple times on his ship when he had, just as something new to do to drive away boredom, but other than a few brief interactions when absolutely necessary, he had never spoken to a human as another human. Now that he had nothing to hide, however, it seemed like it might be easier to talk to Solomon like this than as a disembodied voice.

The mechanics of movement weren’t all that hard, and it wasn’t his first time manoeuvring limbs and such around. He still felt that he wasn’t doing it quite right, his gait and posture and expression all just slightly off, like an accent he couldn’t get entirely rid of.

More disorientating on his part was the narrow focus of senses, now centered around a singular point. He could extend his awareness beyond that of his body or divide his attention just like before if he chose, but all of it was far more concentrated by default, and it took him a moment to get used to it.

By the time he had adjusted to his new state of existence, Solomon was already halfway out the ship’s door.

“Wait,” Uraziel called out, stepping into the hallway.

Solomon whirled around and blinked. “...Uraziel?”

“There’s only so much I can do,” he said. “Ammet, the one who got stabbed, is one of my kind, and he made it so the lockdown traps me as well. He’s much weaker than me, but it would take considerable effort and all of my attention to escape.”

“Is that your body?” Solomon said, still staring at Uraziel. “I mean—I know it isn’t—” He took a breath. “I like it.”

“Thanks,” Uraziel said, oddly pleased even though this really wasn’t the time. “I chose it myself.”

“Good taste,” Solomon said. Then he shook his head. “Sorry, you were saying. Can we just take out Khaba and Ammet?”

“Ammet should be weak to iron and silver, like Asmira’s knives,” Uraziel said. “And Khaba to all normal human means. But I would be unsurprised to learn he has silver on him too, if he was planning on going up against me.”

“They don’t necessarily need to be completely defeated, do they?” Solomon said. “If we just can distract them enough for you to escape and get us to Jerusalem before they do, I legally still have the throne, and could rely on you for protection during the first few days before I can figure out how much Khaba’s influence has spread.”

“It would be easier to kill them, but I’ll keep that option in mind just in case,” Uraziel said. He opened the door. “I’ll distract them. Tell Asmira about Ammet’s weakness when they aren’t looking.”

“—crappy for an AI,” Bartimaeus was saying on the other end of the dock, his voice drifting in from far enough away that Uraziel wasn’t entirely sure Solomon would be able to hear him.

“Excuse me?” Ammet hissed.

“Oh—okay,” Solomon said, and Uraziel was out the door.

This late at night, the docks were empty of others, but there were still enough ships and empty crates and various other items that a person could walk along the side without being immediately spotted. Ammet had appeared to recover at least somewhat from his wound and was carefully holding Asmira in place with shadowy tendrils. Bartimaeus was still standing frozen in place, just where Uraziel had last seen him on the security camera.

“I’m just saying,” Bartimaeus said, as Uraziel walked toward them. “No real personal AI would allow those rugs with your wallpaper, so I can’t say I’m surprised you aren’t one.”

Ammet started saying something, but Khaba cut them off. “Enough. Ammet, they are of no use to me. You may have your fun with them.”

 **“I heard you were looking for me,”** Uraziel said before Ammet could react. All four of them swung to look at him. He wasn’t controlling the lights this time, but he shifted his features just slightly to play into a more ethereal look, surrounding himself once more in sourceless light.

 _“Oh,”_ Khaba said, staring at him with a sort of hunger that left Uraziel feeling vaguely slimy. The people who had first bound him did not express emotions the same way humans did, but Uraziel could recognize the equivalent expression of power lust that he had seen so often before.

“I can’t believe you were holding out on me!” Bartimaeus said. “I spilled you my story and you didn’t even _hint.”_

Asmira said nothing, only watching him with wary eyes.

 **“Ammet,”** Uraziel said, focusing all of his attention on the first member of his kind he had seen in far too long to count. **“It amuses me that your human thinks he can stop me.”**

Ammet sneered at him. “Just because you’re one of the oldest ones doesn’t actually mean you’re unstoppable.”

That was almost enough to give Uraziel a pause. Back at the height of the aliens’ empire, he and the other members of his kind had always interacted with each other with the awareness that none of them were doing this of their own free will. Grudges could be formed, of course, but no one would ever side with their master over one of their own that they had never met before.

 **“You are an infant, and cannot hope to control me,”** Uraziel said with a scoff. He would have pitied Ammet for whatever had caused him to be like that, but enough bad things had happened to him that day for him to just feel spiteful.

Behind Khaba and Ammet, Solomon had managed to get Asmira and Bartimaeus’s attention and was quietly gesturing at them.

“You put on a lot of bluster for someone who can’t even control your own self,” Khaba said. “Ammet, neutralize Cyrene and this one and grab the binding object.”

Uraziel froze. He was not allowed to block someone from grabbing his ring, but there were a lot of things he could do to a mortal before it reached that point. Ammet would be a much harder opponent to stop, and there was every chance that he _could_ make it onto the ship before Uraziel could do anything.

Sending in a more powerful force was an effective way of taking hold of a binding object, but it was not something that ever would have been done in the past. Even though whoever had Ammet’s binding object had power over him, if Ammet had the ring, he would be in control of Uraziel and could potentially use his power to exploit some loophole to gain his own freedom. Whatever was going on between Ammet and Khaba, the trust was not as one sided as Uraziel had initially assumed. Which was great for Ammet, but not at all for Uraziel. 

He prepared himself to engage in whatever all-out fight he needed to in order to stop Ammet from reaching his ship, but at that very moment a number of things happened.

The net suddenly shrunk around him, pressing in around him. He couldn’t move or act or extend any of himself, and he collapsed to the ground. Ammet was still weaker than him, Uraziel managed to think, even with the pressure trying to crush him into a point. All he had to do was gather his strength and he could overpower Ammet’s force.

At the same time, with the sliver of attention not focused on the net, Uraziel could see Ammet’s tendrils tightened around Asmira, only for her to triumphantly wiggle her hand out of his grip, her silver knife held high. Ammet dropped Asmira instantly, and Bartimaeus grabbed her with one hand, using the gun in his free arm to fire a few shots at Ammet and Khaba. The bursts of energy had no effect on Ammet, but he dove in between them and Khaba. Bartimaeus snatched Solomon and tucked him under his other arm, sprinting towards the ship.

“Let go of me!” Asmira shouted. “I need to fight Ammet!”

“I can—” Bartimaeus started.

“Have you ever thrown a knife in your life?” she demanded.

Bartimaeus halted. He dropped Solomon, pushing him to the other side of a different ship. “Stay here,” he told Solomon, who nodded shakily. He spun around, hauling Asmira behind an empty crate a little closer to the action.

Ammet had already started moving in their direction, but at that moment, Uraziel flung every last bit of his gathered energy at Ammet like a battering ram, striking a dent in the force that held him in place. Ammet staggered, but as Uraziel was preparing to strike again, the net squeezed around him even more viciously.

The others were alright for the moment, Uraziel decided. Solomon was hidden far enough away from the action to avoid getting directly involved, and Bartimaeus was capable of protecting Asmira from Khaba and a mostly distracted Ammet. Uraziel turned his attention entirely onto his own predicament, all of his strength and focus fixed entirely on bringing down the net around him.

His second blow was stronger, enough to send cracks throughout the whole structure. Ammet did not retaliate immediately this time, and before anything else could happen, Uraziel struck again, shattering the structure Ammet had built to hold him in place. 

Uraziel was entirely free now, and he could have teleported onto the ship and fled before anything else could happen, since moving himself closer to his binding object and flying a functioning ship would use almost none of his power. But he had made a deal with Solomon. And Solomon had been right. Uraziel cared about them. He didn’t want to leave them to die, Asmira unable to discover what sort of life could exist for her beyond her queen’s orders, Bartimaeus unable to find whatever was so precious to him that he would risk his freedom for it, Solomon unable to return to his beloved planet and regain his throne.

But when Uraziel regained his senses, it was to a scene that appeared to have already mostly taken care of itself.

Both Ammet and Khaba were wounded. Khaba had the burn of laserfire on one hand, his sleeve scorched at the edges, and another gash across the top of his bald head. He was being held by Ammet and with his uninjured hand, he yanked one of Asmira’s daggers out of Ammet’s torso and dropped it to the ground.

Ammet was tensed to fight, but when Uraziel stood up, his movement caught his attention. They locked eyes with each other, and Ammet shifted his stance slightly. 

“You’ll regret this,” he hissed. Before Uraziel could do anything, Ammet had transformed into a large flying creature with Khaba in his talons and bolted into the sky.

“Can you follow him?” Bartimaeus asked, but Uraziel shook his head.

“I’m bound to the ship, I can only go so far from it. But we should be fine for now.”

“I have a hundred questions for both of you,” Asmira told them. “I don’t know what you did to distract Ammet at the end there, Uraziel, but thanks. That gave me a clear shot.”

Uraziel nodded, feeling a bit strange at communicating with body language rather than solely through words like he was used to. “You have a very impressive aim.”

Solomon poked his head out from where he had been hiding. “It’s over?”

“I believe so, for now,” Uraziel said. He knew Solomon had been out of the way for the whole fight, but he couldn’t help but scan him over to make sure there were no hidden wounds. “I’m afraid I did not end up doing all that much of the ‘defeating Khaba’ end of my deal.”

“Well, I don’t think the rest of us could have done it without you and your information and distractions,” Solomon said.

“Yeah,” Asmira said, but she whirled around to face Bartimaeus. “Wait, how did you move back then? Nebet froze you in place!”

“No governor module,” Bartimaeus said, grinning as he tapped his head. “She programmed it to lock me in place, but since I wasn’t listening to it anyway, that did nothing.”

“How long?” Solomon said. “Were you rogue this whole time?”

“Yeah,” Bartimaeus said shortly. “Turns out we don’t all become murderous rampage machines when given even the tiniest bit of freedom.”

“I didn’t mean—” Solomon faltered. “I mean, I’m sorry. Thank you for helping us all this time.”

Bartimaeus stared blankly at him for a full second before looking away. “Yeah, it was nothing.”

“Do you think Khaba will be waiting for us back in Jerusalem?” Asmira asked.

“I doubt it,” Uraziel said. “I’m much stronger than Ammet, so whatever they’ll do next will require planning and preparation.”

“Alright,” Asmira said. “Then we can just go back, get Solomon on the throne again, and part ways?”

“You all can,” Bartimaeus said, and everyone turned to look at him. “Hey, I have other things going on in my life than making sure everything goes well with you guys.”

“Like what exactly?” Uraziel asked pointedly. “You didn’t have any freedom until just a few weeks ago.” How could Bartimaeus have something special to look for when he shouldn’t have had the chance to form any attachments until recently? Uraziel’s kind had always found little ways around their commands and constraints, but they had not been created for captivity, and the forces that kept them bound had never affected their minds.

Bartimaeus just snorted. “Why is it your concern?”

“Because I was thinking,” Uraziel said. “Whatever you’re looking for has to be a lot easier to find when you have someone like me on your side. Especially if you want to wander around areas that are actually capable of picking out a rogue security bot.” 

This of course would only work if Solomon didn’t change his mind and decide to take his ring and Asmira didn’t figure it out herself. But Uraziel found that he actually did trust Solomon to continue keeping his word. He was a little less sure about Asmira, but she didn’t seem the type to be tempted by power for its own sake.

“What’s in it for you?” Bartimaeus asked suspiciously.

“I’m bored,” Uraziel said once more, then hesitated. “And... you’ve managed to grow on me just a bit.”

Bartimaeus blinked then laughed loudly and awkwardly. “Okay fine, not like I got a better plan.”

“Well, if you’ve got that all figured out, let’s get out of here,” Asmira said. “Seeing as Khaba may have bribed or threatened people or whatever to keep the docks clear, but security’s going to come eventually.”

“Good point,” Solomon said. “I’d like to get back as soon as possible anyway.”

* * *

As they returned to the ship, Uraziel walked alongside Solomon, waiting until Asmira and Bartimaeus weren’t looking to lean in to whisper in his ear. 

“Can you take the ring back to your room?” He was already trusting Solomon, so it seemed a bit safer there than in the common room where anyone else could happen upon it.

Solomon nodded quietly and said nothing more. He walked into the common room with the others, waiting while the ship took off again. When Asmira left the room, he followed, quietly slipping the ring into his pocket on his way out. 

“Asmira,” Solomon called out before she could enter her room.

In the hallway, they were still audible to Uraziel and most likely Bartimaeus as well, but Uraziel detached a portion of his consciousness to watch, even as the body he had manifested remained on the sofa.

“Yes?” she asked, sounding too tired to be either particularly polite or testy.

“Do you know what you’ll do now?”

She frowned. “This again?”

“You’re a very good fighter,” Solomon said. “Smart, creative, clever, loyal, and you can stand your own against Ammet. I’ll need some extra security, especially with this Khaba business, but even afterwards it would be good to have the additional protection. I can offer a high paying job with all sorts of benefits and free food and board in my palace if you would like to be a security guard.”

Asmira sighed. “I... appreciate your offer. I just don’t know what I want. I thought I did for so long, but...”

“I’m sorry,” Solomon said quietly.

“I’ll take your job,” Asmira said. “But just for now, until I figure things out a bit more. Don’t expect me to stay forever.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Solomon said. “Thank you. For this and... for everything. For not killing me in the beginning, despite your orders. And risking your life for me just now.”

Asmira shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah. I just. It seemed like the right thing to do.” She opened her door but paused before stepping inside. “Thanks.” 

“You’re welcome,” Solomon said, and waited until Asmira shut the door behind her before returning to his own room. Inside, he set the ring in one of his drawers, and promptly fell asleep.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” Uraziel said to Bartimaeus after a few minutes of silence had passed and both the humans were asleep.

“It’s weird talking to you like this,” Bartimaeus said, gesturing at Uraziel.

“I can get rid of the body if you’d prefer?” Uraziel said, not entirely sure how to respond to that.

“Nah, it’s fine now that you aren’t talking in that weird boomy voice anymore,” Bartimeus said. “And I would have done the same.”

“Yeah, I’m not the only one with secrets,” Uraziel said, raising his eyebrows pointedly. At least he hoped it was pointedly. He had seen hundreds of humans make this expression, but he had never tried it himself.

Bartimaeus made a face. “Guess I’ll have to actually tell you some more things, if you’re helping me search. When can we get back to Alexandria anyway?”

“Now that I’m not confined by matching the limits of human technology, I can make the trip between Alexandria and Jerusalem in less than a day,” Uraziel said. “But I promised I would keep Solomon safe from anything Khaba has set up there until he can be sure he can stand on his own. I don’t think it will take more than a week.”

Bartimaeus was silent for a moment. “Alright. One extra week won’t hurt. How’s this, you’ll tell me your story if I’ll tell you mine?”

“Alright,” Uraziel said. Now that neither he nor Bartimaeus had as much reason to hide, maybe they could have more meaningful conversations. Uraziel was sure that despite the vast differences of their experiences, they would also be able to find a lot of commonality.

“Wait,” Bartimaeus said suddenly, his eyes scanning the room. “Khaba said you had a binding object; it’s the ring, right? Where is it?”

Uraziel felt his face twist into a weird expression. Had he really been that obvious about his reaction to Asmira touching his ring way back during their first day?

“Did Solomon...?” Bartimaeus’s face darkened as he looked back at Uraziel.

“I asked him to move it,” Uraziel said. “I trust him not to use it.”

“You aren’t just being commanded to say that?” Bartimaeus asked suspiciously.

Uraziel snorted. “I’d be a lot more obvious about it if I was trying to pass on a secret message.”

“Alright...” Bartimaeus said, but Uraziel had a feeling he would be keeping a careful watch on Solomon for the rest of their time together.

“What are you looking for?” Uraziel asked. As much as he appreciated the surprising streak of protectiveness, it was unnecessary enough that he didn’t want to dwell.

Bartimaeus stared past the blank screen in front of them. “It’s... I lied when I said it was Asmira’s code that disabled the safety.”

Uraziel stayed quiet. He could have pointed out the hypocrisy of Bartimaeus getting annoyed that Uraziel lied to him, but he was much older and more mature, and the way Bartimaeus said it felt weighted.

“I was sent to Alexandria to guard some kid,” Bartimaeus said. “Ptolemy.” He shifted in his chair. “It’s a long story, but it turned out he was pretty smart and managed to disable the safety on my governor module.”

Uraziel raised an eyebrow at that. There were clearly some important details Bartimaeus was jumping over, but he was still too busy staring into the distance to pay any attention to Uraziel. What kind of a kid could remove the self-destruct aspect of a governor module when there were people who spent billions funding research to get past that? What kind of a kid would give a deadly machine the first step to his freedom?

“He was going to help me with the governor module too, but... something—happened to him and I got reassigned.” Bartimaeus looked down then shrugged. “My contact back on Ramses 7 said he was probably still alive though. Political kidnapping or something.”

There were still a lot of details missing, and if Uraziel was to help find the child, he would need to know who precisely he was, who might have taken him and why, when it had happened and what Bartimaeus knew of the incident. But those could come later, once they could do something about it. Right now, Uraziel got the feeling that Bartimaeus had revealed far more of himself than he would ever want to under any other circumstances.

“I’m sorry,” Uraziel said. “He sounds quite impressive.”

“Yeah,” Bartimaeus said, and his voice was clipped, but a faint smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “He is.”

They were quiet for a moment. Conversational pauses were a lot more awkward when he had a physical presence, Uraziel decided. He couldn’t simply pretend his attention had been caught elsewhere.

“You asked about me,” Uraziel said after enough time had passed for him to think Bartimaeus wouldn’t say anything else. “Anything in particular or?”

“Just your whole general story,” Bartimaeus said, waving a hand vaguely.

“Alright,” Uraziel said, and settled down to summarize the events of his life.

* * *

Uraziel hadn’t been using any of his attention to watch Solomon while he slept, but when Solomon said his name that morning, he could hear it through the walls. With a nod to Bartimaeus, he stood up and went out into the hallway to knock on Solomon’s door.

“Oh,” Solomon said, sounding a bit surprised when he answered the door. He was fully dressed now, though his hair was still messy from sleep. “I didn’t think you would hear me. I forgot for a moment that you weren’t...” He gestured up at the ceiling. 

“I have good hearing,” Uraziel said, as Solomon stepped to the side to let him in before closing the door. “And my name is something that would get my attention.”

“Right,” Solomon said, sitting on his bed. “Er... I don’t really have a place to offer you to sit, but...” He waved his hand at the other side a little awkwardly. “Feel free to sit.”

Uraziel took it. The mood that would come from having him tower over Solomon would be too strange. He wasn’t entirely sure where they stood with each other, with Solomon knowing his secret and having the affection between them laid out in the open, but it seemed better to stand on equal footing and act more comfortable with each other than emphasize any difference.

“Did you want to talk about something?” he asked. It wasn’t really a necessary question. Even on regular mornings, Solomon liked talking to him simply for conversation’s sake, and no doubt he had dozens of questions on this particular morning.

“Yes,” Solomon said, not quite looking at him. “I... Back on Alexandria, I mentioned something about you coming to Jerusalem to help make sure no one killed me until I could be reasonably assured of my safety.”

Uraziel nodded. “Yes.”

“I don’t want to hold you to that obligation,” Solomon said. “I only really asked you to take out Khaba. And Khaba is enough out of the picture that I think it counts as you having met your end. I know you have other plans, like helping Bartimaeus. So I wanted to say that you would not be breaking the terms of our bet if you don’t stick around.”

Uraziel laughed, causing Solomon to frown. 

“What?” Solomon asked.

“You claimed to understand me last night, and I was so surprised when you actually did,” Uraziel said. “But you are completely wrong now. You said I should help you because I cared about you and wouldn’t want to see you dead. Why would that change over the span of a few hours?”

“Well, it’s one thing to fight against someone who is actively trapping you and save three of your friends from immediate danger,” Solomon said. “This... is another thing. But I am glad to hear that.” He looked at Uraziel, deep brown eyes meeting his. “Not just for the sake of my protection.”

There was warmth in the way he said that, and Uraziel had no idea what to do with it. “And I still have your one extra wish to fulfill anyway.”

“Oh,” Solomon said, a strange expression on his face. Uraziel didn’t normally find him this hard to read, and he had no idea what was causing this now. “I was thinking about that. I have no idea how it works with you, but in Earth stories of trapped spirits, they could be freed if the person commanding them wished for it.”

“What?” If Uraziel had been confused before, it was nothing compared to now.

“My wish, as agreed upon by our wager, is for you to be released from the bindings that the aliens have placed on you to return you to your natural state, if you so wish,” Solomon said. “If you trust me to, I would try using the ring myself to give that order, though I also understand if you do not.”

“But it’s _your_ wish,” was the only thing he could think to say. “Why would you use it for me?”

Solomon looked away. “Well. I did say I cared about you too. That I also wanted to do things for you.”

“So you wouldn’t try to keep me?” Uraziel asked, still feeling a little dumbstruck. His mind was vast and could do a dozen tasks at once, contain the memory of billions of years, and comprehend the workings of the universe, but this single human had him faltering like a laggy old computer.

“Can’t say there’s no temptation,” Solomon said with a shrug. “But I’d prefer you to be out there living your life as you want than to be stuck with me unwillingly. I could move on from heartbreak, but not from guilt.”

“Right now?” Uraziel asked because his mind was still incapable of coming up with anything more than basic questions.

“If you want,” Solomon said. He was looking at Uraziel again, dark eyes full of emotions that Uraziel couldn’t name. “It would be nice if you made sure the ship got to Jerusalem in one piece, but like I said, our bet doesn’t extend further than that.”

Uraziel was hit with the strange desire to never have Solomon look away from him again. Of course _he_ cared for Solomon, but he didn’t have all that much to lose by doing so. Solomon could have been the most powerful person in the galaxy if he set aside his affection and morals, and Uraziel had lived long enough to know that that temptation had ruled the lives of countless mortals. Yet he would give that all up for Uraziel’s sake, without the expectation of anything in return.

Many times, Solomon had claimed he wasn’t a good person, and Uraziel didn’t really know enough about human morality to argue for either case, but he certainly was special. It wasn’t just that Uraziel had been bored and lonely for so long that he would cling onto anyone, because Solomon wasn’t just anyone. He cared because Solomon was _Solomon._

“I trust you,” Uraziel said, surprised at how true it was. Perhaps this was all some elaborate manipulation, but even if logic hadn’t been telling him that it would make zero sense for Solomon to relinquish the tie he had to Uraziel, he was sure on an instinctual level that Solomon was not lying. Solomon still hadn’t looked away, and those eyes could not be anything but sincere. “I can’t touch the ring myself.”

Solomon blinked. “Oh, right.” He stood up, digging through the drawer to find the ring where he had hidden it. It sat there in his hand as he hesitated. “So I just put this on and make a wish?”

“Yes,” Uraziel said. He still wasn’t able to tear his gaze away, pulled in like a tidal locked moon.

“Right.” Solomon cleared his throat and slipped the ring on, wincing as he did. “Oh!”

“It’s very powerful, and even I can’t contain all the energy,” Uraziel said apologetically.

“All the more reason not to keep it for myself,” Solomon said, grimacing. “Uraziel...” He didn’t seem prepared to say anything else.

“Yes?” Uraziel said after enough time had passed for it to become awkward.

“If I never see you again, I’m glad I could know you for these few short weeks,” Solomon said.

At this point, Uraziel wasn’t sure if there was a force in the universe that could keep him away from Solomon for long, but before he could say that, Solomon spoke.

“Uraziel, I wish for you to be free of whatever bindings hold you.” He looked directly at Uraziel as he said this.

There was a familiar tug of power as Uraziel was compelled to obey the command he was given. This time, the power was directed largely toward himself, though part of it went to the ring. Solomon screamed and jerked the ring off of himself, but Uraziel barely had time to be concerned before something shifted and he was _free._

It was like he had been trapped under a large stone for so long that he barely even noticed it anymore, only to have it vanish and for him to realize that he could breathe, he could _fly_. Without thinking, he expanded, his body vanishing as he reached out into the universe, spreading himself out far beyond the constraints the ring had put on him, then gathering himself back together just so he could dive between layers of reality that had been blocked off to him for so long, soaring between the stars at speeds mortals couldn’t even dream of. 

And then, caught up as he was in the exhilaration of freedom, he remembered Solomon.

Solomon, who had been so unsure if Uraziel would come back or not, who had been in pain from the ring, who Uraziel was starting to feel enough emotions towards that he might even dare to call it love. Uraziel had to go back to him.

With a thought, he appeared back on the ship with the same body he had used before.

“Oh!” Solomon yelped, jumping at Uraziel’s arrival. “You came back! You were gone for so long and I thought you were...” He made a small helpless gesture.

“I’m staying,” Uraziel said. The ship was nearly at Jerusalem now, which meant he had been gone for several hours. That was longer than he had intended, but there was another part of him that was surprised that he had managed to remember Solomon as soon as he did. Compared to his thousands of years of captivity, a few hours to bask in his freedom was nothing. “Are you okay?”

“What?” Solomon asked blankly. “Oh, right, the ring exploded. I’m fine though. You... You really don’t have anything to get back to?” Solomon had really believed that Uraziel wouldn’t come back, he realized suddenly. And still he had released Uraziel, still cared enough about him to want him to have that life back.

“My kind is not nearly as social as humans, and the universe has not changed so much in that span of time,” Uraziel said. The exploding ring was important, but Solomon was still in one piece so it couldn’t have been too bad, and Uraziel couldn’t bear to have Solomon live in doubt for another moment. “I was merely...” he sought out an appropriate metaphor, “stretching my wings. There will always be time for other things later.”

“You said you’re staying...” Solomon said. “Do you mean—How long do you mean?”

“I told Bartimaeus I’d help him find what he is looking for, so I’d have to leave for that,” Uraziel said, feeling strangely nervous at the question. There had never been much of a future for him to plan for, but now he had the power to do anything he wanted to again, and time had meaning to him in a way it hadn’t before all this. He had mortal friends who he would have to make the best of his time with before they were gone, after all. If he wanted, he could make them immortal without too much difficulty, but they would have to agree to that, and he would have to want it, and even then they weren’t built to last forever like he was and could very well get bored of eternity.

“And then?” Solomon asked.

Everything ahead of him seemed so uncertain, with a thousand things he didn’t know and a thousand things that could go wrong. Anything could change from how he planned because the universe was unpredictable, and humans were so much more changeable than his own kind were. But if it was a question of what he wanted in the present, that wasn’t hard to answer.

“I make no promises,” Uraziel said. “But currently, I would like to stay with you for as long as you allow it.”

Solomon grinned, so wide and unrestrained that it felt like a private view of the person behind the composure he normally wore. “I make no promises either, but I can’t see myself changing my mind about liking you anytime soon.”

That was good enough for now, Uraziel thought. Anything could happen later, but he knew what his next steps would be, and that was all the reassurance he needed. Whatever his new freedom had in store, he at least had someone to face it with. 

That thought was somehow overwhelming, so he frowned at Solomon’s hand. “You said the ring exploded. Were you hurt?”

Solomon shrugged. “Just a bit. The ring disappeared, so no shrapnel or anything. Really it’s fine.”

Uraziel reached out to grasp the hand Solomon had put the ring on. There was a bandage wrapped around it, but underneath, Uraziel could see a circular burn mark, not deep enough to be a cause of alarm, but likely still very painful nonetheless. Someone had tried to take care of it, but the ship had very few medical supplies besides the very basics for small injuries.

This injury was no problem for Uraziel though, and he simply rearranged some molecules, returning the finger to the state it had been in earlier that morning. 

When he looked back up at Solomon’s face, it appeared slightly redder than it had been before. 

“Thank you,” Solomon said quietly. He looked down, then back up at Uraziel. “You know,” he said, too casually to be entirely natural, “if you were human, I’d ask if I could kiss you right now.”

Uraziel considered it. It was surprisingly harder than he expected, with all his emotions feeling squirmy and distracting him from proper thought. “I don’t—I’m not a physical creature like you are. But I’m not opposed?” He knew the symbolic and emotional significance, and that, he discovered, was actually something he craved. Which was bizarre to consider, since his culture recognized no connection even close to matching human romance. Perhaps he had spent too long interacting with mortals.

“Yes,” Uraziel decided, feeling giddy and nervous all at once. “You can.”

“Kiss you or ask you?” Solomon asked.

“Both?” Uraziel said, not entirely sure what to make of that question.

“That was a bad question on my part,” Solomon said with an awkward chuckle, before leaning in to press a soft kiss to Uraziel’s lips.

It was, Uraziel decided, both strange and pleasant.

Solomon pulled away after a moment. “So how was that for a ‘non-physical creature’ like you?”

With Solomon smiling at him like that, warm and soft, like all the answers to the universe were right in front of him, Uraziel thought that even if he had been entirely neutral on the matter personally, he still would have liked it. “I wouldn’t mind doing that multiple times throughout the time we know each other,” he said because apparently his mind was functioning poorly enough to default on a slightly drier and less expressive way of talking. “What would you have done if I really was an AI?”

Solomon blinked at him.

“No body,” Uraziel clarified.

“Oh,” Solomon said and laughed. “Enjoyed your company and words like before, of course.”

“We can do that too,” Uraziel said, his mind still feeling a bit fuzzy. The days of wandering the universe alone, trapped on his small ship were gone, and Uraziel would not miss them. He might have to consider the future now, with all the uncertainties that entailed, but that thrilled him more than it worried him.

“Of course,” Solomon said, still grinning.

All of that attention, the affection in Solomon’s eyes and voice felt more than Uraziel could take at the moment. He wanted to come back to this feeling, preserve it for eternity, but it also felt a bit much. “We’re almost at Jerusalem now.”

“At long last!” Solomon said, a different sort of joy in his expression.

Uraziel still couldn’t quite understand Solomon’s attachment to a particular place, but he remembered the elation of returning to his old state after being trapped for so long, and the delight at returning to Solomon with his affection and familiarity, and he wondered if it was anything like that.

With Solomon there, Uraziel knew his experience of Jerusalem would be quite different than any of the times in the past, a place of good memories and associations instead of just negative ones. Perhaps in time, he could even call it his home as well. That seemed to be asking a lot from the future, but for once, Uraziel was feeling rather optimistic.


End file.
